JOSEPH CONRAD

The mind of man is capable of anything because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage who can tell? but truth truth stripped of its cloak of time.(Heart of Darkness, 106)

Conrads deserving a place in the history of English literature is rather unusual. He was not English. He was not even born in an Anglo-American cultural environment. Born to Polish parents in the Russian-dominated Ukraine, he saw England only when he was twenty-one. A seaman and an officer in the merchant marine, he was primarily seen by his contemporaries as a writer of sea stories. What attracted his audiences was the adventurous side of his novels. Yet understanding Conrad has never been an easy task for readers, which is clear evidence for the fact that, beyond the apparent adventure pattern of his stories, there always is some deep seriousness. His stories were mainly enjoyed as stories, which is not surprising if one considers the quality of the events that he narrated. *The readers+ interpreted as an amateurs or foreigners clumsiness certain experiments in structure and style which anticipated those of William Faulkner. 1 It was only later in the twentieth century that Conrad came to be appreciated as one of the most accomplished English stylists, whose writings have a marked philosophical and psychological character. Yet, no matter how English Conrad may have become
1

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

by serving under the English flag and writing novels in English, he would remain, to the end of his life, an exile. Unlike any of his fellow novelists, Conrad is English, while essentially remaining European, which accounts for the very special sceptical and ironic views expressed in his novels. The obvious difficulty of his style has, more often than not, made readers keep aloof from his work. This is so much the more surprising if we consider the fact that, from among all modernist or modernism anticipating novels, his has enjoyed the benefit of being, in terms of plot at least, closest to the adventure stories audiences seemed to be used to and like. Inspired from the authors first-hand experience, Conrads novels appealed to the nineteenth century general public mainly because of their adventurous quality. Set in very exotic, sometimes known or recognisable environments, they have deluded readers into thinking that they were just adventure stories, devoid of deeper meanings, thus primarily intended for entertainment. The fact that Conrad was a Pole and a seaman who had so presumptuously taken to writing novels in English has made even more learned readers misunderstand the purpose and scope of his novels for quite a long time. Conrad was not credited with the seriousness of a professional writer, he was not taken seriously by his contemporaries in literary matters. A work that clearly anticipated the techniques to be perfected later on by the modernist novelists seemed to be predisposed only to superficial readings. Readers did not seem willing to move beyond the comfortable surface made up of just a succession of inciting events. Besides, Conrad, as compared to the other modernist writers, did not extensively use the various consciousness-rendering techniques in his novels, the techniques for which the modernist experimental novels have been recognised as innovating by the educated twentieth-century readers. It seems that no category of readers has felt totally comfortable with Conrads literary offer. The common readers, who could have been attracted b y the adventurous aspect of Conrads writings, must have found them too technically difficult to cope with. The comparatively fewer elite readers may have disliked his work precisely on account of its too facile and accessible

content. This is a paradoxical situation that, starting with Conrad and the tradition he and Henry James set up, came to characterise the work of all modernist novelists and its reception. While displaying clear affinities with the realist novel, while being, superficially, adventure stories, Conrads novels have confronted audiences with very elaborate narrative schemes, constantly challenging the readers knowledge both of the world and of the novelistic conventions. His work has incited interest as much as it has baffled and scared readers away. Under the circumstances, this chapter is not intended as an exhaustive analysis of Conrads work. It is just an attempt to reach a better and more profound understanding of Conrads literary performance in the context of the turn -ofthe-century and modernist literature. Anticipating the devices of modernism, Conrads technical innovation was prompted by his very personal sense of value and philosophy of life. Given the source of inspiration of his novels, Conrads technique was supposed to perform a double function. It had, on the one hand, to strike a correct balance between the subjectivity presupposed by personal experience and the objectivity and impersonality required from any valuable piece of narrative writing. On the other hand, it had to be made into an instrument capable of rendering the relativity of a changing world. Bridging the gap between the stable Victorian value system and the relative, fluctuating one of the twentieth century, Conrads work evolves around a very original co de of essential and perennial values, such as manliness, loyalty, courage, and duty. And, in a fairly paradoxical way, a technique of indirectness and relativity manages to sustain, in Conrads case, the assertion of a solid system of old and stable chivalric values, while placing under a huge question mark the inner balance of the individual in permanent search of his inner self. The main feature of the Victorian age is its apparent sense of security and stability. This is mainly due to its being perceived as underlain by a set of unquestioned and unquestionable values. The turn of the century confronted

the individual with a state of crisis manifested by the destruction of the unity, by the explosion of the universe in infinite value fragments. By reading Conrads work, we have the chance to find out what happens in the moment of crisis, at the turn of the century, in a moment when stability and instability interact, which creates a cultural whirl that literature considers it its task to represent. The technique Conrad devised, in anticipation of the elaborate purely modernist stream of consciousness technique, turned his literature into a means of investigation of the darkest recesses of the human soul and of the essentials of the human nature. Yet, readers cannot help noticing that the cultural and literary heritage of modern(ist) Conrad, no matter how reluctant to accept it they may be, is Victorian. Just like his future modernist fellow writers, Conrad incorporated this heritage into his work, possibly aware of the fact that readers are incapable of appropriately decoding the novelty in absence of the proper amount of given and known information. Thus the issues, theories and philosophical ideas Conrad dealt with and enlarged upon in his novels, as well as the technique he used indicate his turn-of-the-century condition. They testify, on the one hand, to his belonging to the nineteenthcentury, while they point to his contribution to modernism, on the other. Without impudently offending the public sense of value, Conrad learned to play with his readers horizons of expectations. He asserted and denied, confirmed and refuted the Victorian heritage, both in terms of ideas and of technique, by satisfying and challenging at the same time his readers expectations. Although he started creating in the Victorian period, when the realist convention of novel writing was at its highest, Conrad is never labelled as a Victorian writer. If histories of literature mention him, it is less for the Victorian quality of his work than for his being a precursor of modernism. To be more accurate as to his position in the evolution of the English novel, however, it is better to consider him a turn-of-the-century writer. Thus Conrad is neither a fully-fledged realist, nor a perfectly defined modernist. Yet he is both by his Janus-like way of facing backwards, towards the achieved realist

tradition, and forwards, towards the nascent modernism. What makes his work worth including in histories of literature is exactly his having had the privilege of contemplating the period of crisis of the Victorian value system and, more importantly, his being aware of it. This state of awareness prompted him to choose that technique able to render the complexity of an old new age, which made him known and worth mentioning in relation to the modernist enterprise. Conrads novels perform a clear shift of focus from the outer to the inner aspects of the self, dictated by the novelists awareness of the state of crisis at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Yet, the subject matter of Conrads novels seems to be anchored in the solid Victorian tradition, which sometimes makes readers mistake his technical devices for the conventions of realism. These two contradictory, yet possible, readings simultaneously activated by Conrads text give us the measure of the complexity and profoundness of Conrads work. While being rooted in the factual reality of the turn-of-the-century period, it opens up toward a deeper symbolical dimension, thus effectively bridging the gap between the particular and the general. The paradox about Conrads work is that it simultaneously asserts and subverts a stable value system, giving prominence to the potentialities of the self to be in and out of an inherited moral framework. References to the Empire should not, therefore, be a surprise to any reader familiar with the turn-of-the-century matters, but they certainly cannot prove Conrad to be a Victorian writer, since matters relating to Britains imperialistic experience had been, by consensus, taken as taboo subjects at the time. As ambiguously suggested by the title, Conrads Heart of Darkness may be simultaneously seen as a novel about a voyage into the heart of the jungle, about the condition of the Empire at the end of the Victorian period, as well as about a journey into the self. The form of Conrads novel, result of the carefully selected narrative method, encourages each and all of these readings, separately and simultaneously. All readings, however, contribute to

understanding Conrads work as an investigation of the human self in its various aspects. Described in unequivocal terms as the powerful long novella of imperialism2, Conrads Heart of Darkness, written in 1899 and published in volume form in 1902, challenges the nineteenth-century readers horizon of expectations, ironically questioning and undermining the very bases of the value system that it seems to assert and impose. Heart of Darkness artfully contrasts two value systems whose encounter defines the turn-of-the-century period, Victorianism and the twentieth century. It thus creates the background against which the potentialities of the novel as an art form are revealed as a valuable instrument of investigation of the self. Introducing Marlow, eye witness and narrator, from the very beginning of the novel as part of the intended technique of indirectness, pointing to Marlows propensity to moving and searching meanings beyond the palpable reality, Conrad clearly indicates that the novel will not be like any other novel, that the form the shell is part of the meaning and has to be understood as well as the events described. A new form is necessary because the novel is not a mere reflection of the tangible, and known reality, but an exploration of different types of reality.3
[] Marlow was not typical [] and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. (67-68)

Apparently assuming a position of objectivity that conveys the meaning of an undoubted pride in and submission to the values of the Empire, permeated, however, with a subtle ironic flavour, Conrad presents the Thames in the opening pages of the novel. The reference to the history associated with the river, presented in binary oppositions, helps the reader see the meaning directions opened by Conrads further treatment of the subject.

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

The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth. [] It had known the ships and the men. [] the adventurers and the settlers; kings ships and the ships of men on Change; captains, admirals, the dark interlopers of the Eastern trade, and the commissioned generals of East India fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empire. (66-67)

Starting in London at an indefinite moment of time, which, however, is historically suggestive of the time of the British Empire, Conrads Heart of Darkness raises a number of issues relating to the advent of a new era, characterised by relativity, fragmentariness, instability, lack of a shared sense of public value. Familiar with the new philosophical ideas emerging in the age, with the premises of anthropological studies combined with Freudian theories, Conrad voices his interest in the problems of the Empire and in imperialism as a starting point for his investigation of the nature of mans relation to himself and to other. The incursion of the white civilised missionaries into the heart of the African darkness is only a pretext for Conrads unveiling the mysteries of the human nature, and analysing the darkness of the human heart. The ambiguously formulated title encourages the reading of the novel at these two levels. Heart of darkness may be seen as a metaphor of the jungle of Africa, but it can equally be decoded as the dark aspects of the human heart. The modern individual oscillates between two conflicting tendencies. One implies the effort to find and cast meaning upon an apparently incoherent and meaningless reality, the other implies a denial of any unifying value, a questioning of the very possibility of any meaning. The former tendency presupposes an interpretation of the title as a journey into the darkness, which has a heart, so
3

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

eventually a meaning worth looking for. The latter focuses on the innermost and darkest aspects of the human being, whose investigation is nothing but a failure. The individual must acknowledge his condition of duplicity, as part of a stable moral system, of meaningfulness, on the one hand, and as part of the puzzle of existence, of meaninglessness, on the other. The main features of the Victorian age, self-confidence, progress, stability, trust in the individual, originate all in the power and the scope of the Empire. It is the Empire that provides the individual with the comforting feeling of belonging to an immutable and incontestable value system. Under the circumstances, it is hardly conceivable that the British would ever think of questioning the almightiness of the monarchy or Londons being the commercial and financial centre of the world. Much of the individual sense of confidence and stability is given by these two major Victorian strongholds that give the measure of Britishness and lead to the definition of the place of Great Britain in the world. For this particular beneficial effect that the Empire and its institutions were considered to have on the individual at the end of the nineteenth century, one cannot expect that they will ever become plain subject matters of literature and be seen as other than taboo subjects. This mentality characteristic of the nineteenth-century Victorian England can be considered to be the reason why Conrad chose to write Heart of Darkness adopting the standpoint of the cultural exile, which was what gave him, to a certain extent, the freedom to tackle such a delicate problem. That is also the premise from which Conrad may have started when he conceived Heart of Darkness as a highly ambiguous narrative text, asking far more questions than it proved ready to offer answers to. By a method of indirectness, which presupposed the presence of Marlow, protagonist and narrator, Conrad invites the reader to perform the act of reading at various levels simultaneously, to learn to become an active participant in the act of meaning of creation. The main quality of Heart of Darkness is its being challenging to its readership artistically, philosophically and politically. 4 The choice of the method of framing the narration of events within a narrative is dictated by Conrads intention to allow the creation of deliberate thematic ambiguities, a critical
4

Brian Spittles, op. cit., 62.

historical perspective and a tone of ironic detachment.5 In all situations, it is Conrad, the lifelong exile and the precursor of modernism, in conflict with Conrad, the nineteenth-century British subject, who tries to refresh his readers perception of reality and to formulate and impose a new status of literature. It would be thus too easy to say that Heart of Darkness is the story of a voyage of exploration in search for ivory down the Congo into the heart of Africa. Reading the novel as a story of the rightful and beneficial transfer of the values of white civilisation to the black savage people of Africa would be oversimplifying. The sophisticated symbolical texture of Conrads novel reveals unsuspected meanings, rather unorthodox for the age, about the essence of the relationships established between civilisation and primitivism in the light of the theories formulated by anthropology at the turn of the century. Primitivism is almost as old, it may be supposed, as civilisation; both terms, of course, being relational. As a literary convention, primitivism allows the civilised to inspect, or to indulge, itself through an imaginary opposite. It is often a self-critical motif within the culture []. But in the modernist period a radical questioning of the present civilisation along with the close study of tribal people gave a new edge to the primitivist impulse.6 In line with the ideas forwarded by anthropology, Conrad focuses on issues such as the classification and relationship of races and cultures, hinting at the environmental and social relations. Yet his major interest, which benefited from the most extensive treatment, engendering thus the best artistic achievement, is in mans nature and destiny, especially from the perspective of mans relation to God. It is not surprising, therefore, that Conrad uses religious symbols to interpret the nature of the colonisation process. Man performs an exploratory descent into the primitive sources of the human being, as Conrad seems to believe that, only by exposure to evil, can man achieve selfknowledge and understand the essence of reality, or life.

Ibid., 62.

Michael Bell, The Metaphysics of Modernism, The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 20.

They [the colonists] wandered here and there with their absurd long staves in their hands, like a lot of faithless pilgrims bewitched inside a rotten fence. The word ivory rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove! Ive never seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this clear speck on earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion. (Heart of Darkness, 89)

By establishing an analogy between the modern colonists and the Middle Ages pilgrims, Conrad challenges the readers knowledge of the benefits of colonisation. Although the modern colonists look very much like the pilgrims in the Middle Ages, with the staves in their hands reminding of the old palm leaves, Conrad repeatedly and ironically points to the fact that the pilgrims were armed to the teeth. Thus all the essential humanistic values lying at the core of the pilgrimage in Christian terms are questioned and invalidated by the greed, rapacity and violence that characterise the group of people in search for ivory. Wealth, symbolically present under the form of ivory, is the only faith that the white people have. Throughout the novel, ivory is the shrine at which the pilgrims pray. There is only one exception, when ivory acquires a much deeper meaning than that of material wealth that is associated with the rapacious plunder of the jungle. Mr. Kurtz, Marlows double and symbol for his unconscious, the Holy Grail that the uninitiated Marlow is in search for, is the man who had proved the ablest of all colonists. Kurtzs original status in the African territories is particularly revealing as regards the value standards in circulation at the end of the nineteenth century as far as the purpose and scope of the Empire were concerned. Educated in Britain, Kurtzs perception of the uncivilised savages was infused with all the clichs currently associated with the native populations in occupied territories, which Conrad seems to demolish in an ironic tone.

The original Kurtz had been educated partly in England, and as he was good enough to say himself his sympathies were in the right place. His mother was half-English, his father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz [](122)

The report that he wrote for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs concluded by Exterminate all the brutes! gives the whole dimension of Kurtzs, and implicitly Europes, colonising potential. Yet under the pressure of darkness, Kurtz, and through him Marlow, is the one who discovers the immensity and impenetrability of the unconscious, having the revelation of the power of the unconscious to invade and control consciousness. It is significant to remark at this point that Conrad created in a period of colonial expansion scientifically grounded by the rise of anthropology, with Freud becoming fascinated by primitive life and artefacts. The relationship of consciousness to the unconscious in his [Freuds] metaphorical discourse reflects the structure of colonialism with the unconscious as the region to be colonised and controlled by the ego.7
My ivory. Oh, yes, I heard him. My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything belonged to him but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. (121)

At the heart of the jungle, Kurtz dares challenge the very position of God, he places himself at the centre of the universe, gesture of impiety which jeopardises his integrity. Kurtz becomes the God of darkness, and he is immortalised into a monument of darkness. Kurtz, the dying man, leaves room for Kurtz, the God of the worshippers. At this moment, ivory no longer stands for the object of human greed, it symbolically becomes the material out of
7

Michael Bell, op cit., 23.

which Kurtz, God and man, is made. It is in ivory that the darkest and finest threads of the individual conscious and unconscious being are carved.
Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasnt touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: The horror! The horror! (147)

The ambiguity that Kurtzs last words create, as Conrad chooses to give no clear indication regarding the referent of Kurtzs vision, encourages the interpretation of the novel in terms of various realities, other than the palpable one. In confrontation with the other, the individual manages to discover his hidden, darker self. Marlow is exposed to the evil existing latently in the human nature, and it is only through evil that he can reach the truth and purify himself to be able to understand the essence of the good. In order to demonstrate the force, and yet the vulnerability of the individual, confronted with the aggressiveness of hostile forces, Conrad resorts to a much older set of values, that he transplants in the new context of the twentieth-century relativity. He takes over and personally interprets the chivalric code, making it pliable to the new co-ordinates of a tainted civilisation. In a world marked by the death of God, Conrad tries to transfer the values of chivalry, and to make them consonant, up to a certain point, with the modern cultural environment. His attempt is to accommodate the Christian chivalric value system to the questioned, questionable and deformed modern one. Yet in spite of the apparent solidity and simplicity of the ideas Conrad constructed his work on, Heart of Darkness turns out to be a sophisticated investigation of the darkness of the self, avoiding at the same time, by the choice of narrative technique, simple-mindedness and straightforwardness. The

narrative structure being centred on Marlow, and the story being filtered through memories means that meaning is deliberately placed under question, that nothing can be taken for granted, as the narrators themselves are susceptible to questioning. Yet, in a manner that would become common practice in modernism, Heart of Darkness demonstrates that the mind and the inner life of the individual are far more complex than what can become apparent at the level of the restricted reality of external events.
The mind of man is capable of anything because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage who can tell? but truth truth stripped of its cloak of time.(106)

Marlow, as the narrator and experiencer of the story, serves Conrads artistic purpose by his investigating abilities, of self and other. His readiness to expose himself to the challenge of initiation makes him into the perfect embodiment of Conrads philosophy.
He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. (67)

Artistically, Marlow is meaning, while being, at the same time, the way of access to the meaning of reality. In Heart of Darkness, moreover, Marlow is individually engaged in a process of initiation, which grants him ascendancy on his fellow sailors. Embarking upon a test and quest initiation journey, or voyage, suggested by his sailing down the Congo into the heart of the jungle, Marlow performs an incursion into the self, as well as into human nature. Substantially and in its central emphasis Heart of Darkness concerns Marlow [] and his journey toward and through certain facts and potentialities of the self.8 What is surprising about Conrads thesis is that Marlow may not be, technically speaking, a reliable narrator, but he is to be fully trusted as to the
8

Albert J. Guerard, The Journey Within, Conrad. A Casebook. Heart of Darkness, Nostromo and Under Western Eyes, ed. C. B. Cox (London: Macmillan, 1981) 52.

investigations of the self and of the human nature in his capacity as a captain. To be a captain, in Conrads view, means having a position reached by personal effort, and due to personal value. Ascendancy is gained by qualities intrinsic to the individual, and not imposed from the outside. The crew functions as an entity and a unified body, because its members agree to observe a code similar to the chivalric one, they agree to see in one another the values and qualities that counterbalance the threat of the hostile, dismembering and distorting forces in the universe. Conrad emphasises the applicability of the hierarchical system from the very beginning of Heart of Darkness.
The Lawyer the best of old fellows had, because of his many years and many virtues, the only cushion on deck, and was lying on the only rug. The Accountant had brought out already a box of dominoes, and was toying architecturally with the bones. Marlow sat cross-legged right aft, leaning against the mizzenmast. (66)

Marlow is not only a technical invention and innovation to ensure the appropriate degree of involvement and detachment at the same time on the part of the writer. Marlow himself reiterates often enough that he is recounting a spiritual voyage of self-discovery. He remarks casually but crucially that he did not know himself before setting out []9 The encounter between Marlow and Kurtz points to the central theme of Heart of Darkness, that of initiation. Man performs an exploratory descent into the primitive sources of the human being. Conrad seems to believe that, only by exposure to evil, can man achieve self-knowledge and understand the essence of reality, or life. Yet, even if Marlow reaches a state of self-awareness at the end of the voyage, the novel does not posit, optimistically, the idea of a meaning underlying all things. Marlows voyage of self-exploration is just another form of mans attempt to come to terms with a universe devoid of stable central values. Yet his being incapable of producing an appropriate explanation as far as Kurtz was concerned is indicative of the fact that at the end of his journey,
9

Albert J. Guerard, The Journey Within, 53.

far from being redeemed and in possession of moral truths, as the pattern of the novel seems to suggest, Marlow becomes only more self-aware, cursed to acknowledge his inner darkness, and to learn to live with it. The perennial values that the initiation journey implies are undermined by the discovery that the self is ultimately darkness. The ambiguity of the language used in connection with Marlows meeting Kurtz points to the potential stability of Marlows value system, subversively undermined by his final discovery. In the interior you will no doubt meet Mr. Kurtz. (84) The reading of Conrads works in terms of simultaneous stability and fragmentation, of strongly asserted values and horribly questioned ones is synthesised in Marlows symbolic encounter with Kurtz, or, in the light of our demonstration, with his real self.
Soul! If anybody ever struggled with a soul, I am the man. And I wasnt arguing with a lunatic either. Believe me or not, his intelligence was perfectly clear concentrated, it is true, upon himself with horrible intensity, yet clear; [] But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad. I had for my sins, I suppose to go through the ordeal of looking into it myself. [] I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself. (144)

Notromo, just like Heart of Darkness, simultaneously is a novel about imperialism and about the human condition, about the individuals search for identity, about his propensity towards progress and self-destruction, about good and evil, about the darkness inherent in human greatness. In a typically modernist manner, Conrad plays with his readers horizon of expectations and draws him into the challenging game of coping with interrelated layers of significance. Nostromo derives its title from the name of one, we could say the main, character. That is what the readers expected from a turn-of-the-century novel,

that was one of the ways titles were made use of in relation to the novels progress according to the Victorian conventions. The feeling of confidence before things known in point of narrative organisation is so great that the reader is not tempted to give a second thought to the strangeness of the name itself Nostromo. Only on concluding the reading of the novel does he feel invited to correlate the name with Conrads statement in the Authors Note to Nostromo. Antonia the Aristocrat and Nostromo the Man of the People are the artisans of the New Era, the true creators of the New State; he by his legendary and daring feat, she, like a woman, simply by the force of what she is: the only being capable of inspiring a sincere passion in the heart of a trifler.10 The novel undoubtedly offers an image of Western imperialism. Yet by interpreting the title in the light of Conrads statement, the reader is forced to move back to a remote cultural and literary tradition, of a more general value, embedded and inherent in the modern one the medieval system and the allegorical mode of creation. Thus the appropriate, even if not exhaustive, access to the meaning of the novel necessarily implies the r eaders ability to activate at least two horizons of knowledge and to use two interpretative schemes. Conrads novel is not strictly about imperialism and the effects it has on the individual, as John Holloway suggests. Nostromo (1904), unquestionably Conrads masterpiece, provides a definitive picture of how Western financial imperialism *+, proffering to bring to an equatorial American society material advancement and an end to the picturesque banditry of the past, in fact brings only spiritual emptiness and an unnoticed compromise with principle, or progressive blindness to it.11 Nostromo focuses on the effects of the colonists presence in the imaginary Republic of Costaguana. Apparently in deference to the commonly accepted value system established by the British Empire, Conrad sees the European, especially English intrusion as beneficial to the countrys interests. The order and prosperity that the silver mine brought to the region of Sulaco
10 11

Joseph Conrad, Authors Note to Nostromo (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1994) 13. John Holloway, The Literary Scene, The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, 7, From James to Eliot, ed. Boris Ford (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990) 66-67.

relieved the native inhabitants of the terror and poverty inflicted upon them by the dictatorship of the Spanish. In this way, Conrad asserts and implicitly questions the beneficial effects of European imperialism. Yet in the description of Mrs Goulds house in Sulaco, he seems to plead for unity in diversity, for all the moral values that were said to be underlying the imperialistic expansion in compensation for the destructive effects of the same action.

She kept her old Spanish house (one of the finest specimens in Sulaco) open for dispensation of the small graces of existence. She dispensed them with simplicity and charm because she was guided by an alert perception of values. She was highly gifted in the art of human intercourse which consists in delicate shades of self-forgetfulness and in the suggestion of universal comprehension. Charles Gould (the Gould family, established in Costaguana for three generations, always went to England for their education and for their wives) imagined that he had fallen in love with a girls sound common sense like any other man *+ (50)

Mrs Gould is of Italian origin, but she is made to embody the whole spirit of the Victorian age. The quoted passage ironically refers to the generally acknowledged superiority of the English, to their privileged but also providential role, no matter in which part of the world they decided to set foot with civilising intentions. The reader may be thus tempted to take things literally and consider Conrad a writer whose late assimilation as a British subject dictated a position of acceptance of and subservience to the imperialistic values. Yet the readers expectations are challenged by the novels being opened towards a symbolic dimension. The symbolic texture of Nostromo is exquisite and highly elaborate. It gives the novel the atemporal dimension that is absent in the apparent strict chronology of the story, whether the chronological aspects cover the extended

history of the Republic of Costaguana or the detailed description of the three revolutionary days of Sulaco. The first part The Silver of the Mine introduces one of the central symbols of the novel, in the light of which most of the meaning of Nostromo intended by Conrad is to be interpreted. The silver of the San Tome mine is presented in the novel both as destructive and regenerative, yet central to the existence of practically all the characters of the novel. Apparently, it is the cause of some of the characters wealth and progress and of some others death. This is, however, an oversimplifying reading that could be avoided by a closer look at the symbolic valences of this noble metal. The interpretation of silver as a symbol is beneficial to the overall meaning of the novel, since this symbol is not used in isolation, but interwoven in the novels symbolic texture in close correlation with two other significant ones - the light and the island. White and shining, silver symbolises purity and purification, the purity of consciousness, sincerity and loyalty. It is also associated with the royal dignity. Yet from an ethical point of view, silver symbolises greed and moral degradation, which is a form of perversion of its original value. 12 Since silver is essential to the story of Nostromo, all the characters relating to it in one way or another, its centrality is one of the main engines actuating the interpretation of the novel on different levels of significance. Nostromo dwells upon the destructive effects of imperialism in its material interests, as much as it does on the voyages of initiation and exploration of the self undertaken by Decoud and Nostromo. Ivory as a symbol generates the same ambiguity of interpretation in Heart of Darkness. The novels underlying value system oscillates between the greed and destruction inherent in the imperialistic experience, and more elaborately in human nature, and the civilising beneficence of the same experience. Because of its white colour, ivory is a symbol of purity. The fact that it was used as a material for Solomons throne, it could mean power, in the sense that it cannot be broken or destroyed. It may also be associated with incorruptibility.
12

13

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

see Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, Dicionar de simboluri, vol.3 (Bucureti: Editura Artemis, 1995) 140. 13 see Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, op. cit., vol.2, 50.

interpreted both as a novel of and about imperialism in Africa, but also as a novel of initiation focusing on mans need and ability to investigate the darkness of human nature. Due to the centrality of the two symbols to the structure of the novels, both Nostromo and Heart of Darkness encourage a reading in which time and timelessness merge. Thus the reader is compelled to consider simultaneously both meanings relating to the imperialistic experience at the end of the nineteenth century and meanings pertaining to much older value systems ranging from primitivism to the Middle Ages. From a narrative point of view, Conrad uses in both novels knowledge strategies similar, in the sense that he starts from what his readers expect given the moral system in which they were born and educated. Then, subtly, in most cases ironically, he challenges their expectations, compelling them to reorganise their perceptions and knowledge horizon. Conrads standpoint as regards the imperialistic experience is more clearly formulated in Heart of Darkness than in Nostromo, simply because he decides to leave aside an explicit reference to the presence of the British in Africa. This is contrary to historical facts, but it allows him to take a less biased view of the mechanism and philosophy of the empire. Following the common public opinion at the time, according to which the white peoples presence in the colonised territories had a highly moral civilising effect upon the savage native inhabitants, Conrad presents the colonists as pilgrims, expected to behave in moral purity, humility and pity towards the other. Contrary to expectations, they all wear guns, as they are driven by material rather than moral or spiritual interests. Familiar with Darwins theory of evolution according to which living things developed differently in different places over a long period of time, theory launched at a moment when most Western people believed that all things were created by God, Conrad makes Kurtz into an idol and God of the savages. He thus questions his readers common perception of the savage people and forces them to rethink their existing system of knowledge.

Following the same line of argument, Conrad who endows Marlow, the narrator and experiencer of the story along the Congo, with discerning and judgement faculties, conceives him as a materialisation of the same clash between inherited patterns and clichs and new ideas emerging at the turn of the century. Thus Marlow initially perceives the savages as an inferior species on the line of evolution
A slight clinking behind me made me turn my head. Six black men advanced in a file, toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their footsteps. Black rags were wound round their loins, and the short ends behind waggled to and fro like tails. (80)

to be able just later on to assess and understand them as what they really were a different civilisation, distinct from and yet similar to the white European one.
It was very curious to see the contrast of expressions of the white men and of the black fellows of our crew []. The whites, of course greatly discomposed, had besides a curious look of being painfully shocked by such an outrageous row. The others had an alert, naturally interested expression; but their faces were essentially quiet [] (111)

Yet Conrad was not interested in the imperial experience per se, the ideological implications of imperialism are hardly resonant with the writers more philosophical interest in the evolution of the self. The intimate contact with the primitive and the savage, the isolation from the constraining forces of institutionalised civilisation, revealed a truth of human nature. It is latently both barbaric and insecure: capable of inflicting almost inconceivable cruelty on other humans, and always on the brink of ontological crisis and consequent self-destruction.14 This brings about, on Conrads part, a questioning of the fundamental values of the civilisation that is capable of undergoing such disintegration. For Conrad, darkness is the possible equivalent of the unknown,
14

Brian Spittles, op. cit., 21.

but first of all it stands for the primitive condition of human life, with a return towards the primordial jungle and water, an opportunity to rediscover the depths of the individual soul. Conrads point is that ultimately, when contemplating mans real nature, there is no essential difference between an individual socially perceived as evil and one that the admiring eyes of men see as good. The same fear, anxiety, even puzzlement experienced by Nostromo, Marlow or Kurtz before human darkness also torment Sotillo or the Negroes, apparently the embodiment of the principle of evil according to the generally accepted Western standards at the end of the nineteenth century. The fusion of the timeless and of the temporal, or better said the embedding of the temporal into the timeless, is a characteristic of most modernist novels, covering the specific treatment of time in modernist fiction. As the modernist novelists develop an explicit interest in the individual, more precisely in the mental life of the individual, ranging from the conscious to the unconscious, they inevitably have to reorganise their perception of time. Time is no longer perceived only in its chronological, clock-measured aspects, but mainly in its subjective dimension. The concept of time was probably one of the most clearly affected by the shift of interest of modernist fiction from the objective to the subjective, from external events to the inner life of the individual. The elaborate and sophisticated narrative technique Conrad uses in his novels opens up deeper meaning possibilities in the interpretation of the novelists work. The interposing of a narrator, or narrators, between the reader and the story, as well as the masterly woven symbolic texture of the novels help Conrad go beyond the strictly delimited historical time and place his work into an atemporal dimension. His novels are about distinct individuals evolving in a distinct cultural environment, as much as they are novels about the human nature and the condition of the human being in relation to himself, to the other human beings and to the universe in which he lives. Conrads novels are in and out of their time simultaneously, making readers reorganise both their knowledge of the contemporary world and their perception of the place

contemporaneity has within the time continuum. Conrad oscillates between the particular and the general, freely moving between the two in his conception of the novel. Unlike other modernist novelists who seemed to have taken refuge in their work from the aggressive and shifting reality they lived in, Conrad dares confront significant issues specific to the turn-of-the-century period, asserting and undermining at the same time the stable and hardly contested Victorian value system. Drawing on his experience on board the ship, Conrad builds his own system of values on the perennial hard core of the much older moral code of chivalry. In this way, he transgresses the boundaries of his age and places his work in a dimension of timelessness. As far as time handling is concerned, Heart of Darkness, which is the story of Marlows voyage along the Congo into the heart of the jungle, is expected to progress in clear sequence, following a more or less clear chronology. Even if the initiation meaning is associated to the voyage, in line with the chivalric code that Conrad refers to from the first pages of the novel when he emphasises the hierarchical organisation on board The Nellie, it is still in stages that one expects the process to take place. The story of the voyage into the jungle, literally, or into the human self, symbolically, represents the core of the novel and occupies most of the space of the book with the exception of the first two and the last pages. It is understandable that the most audible voice should be Marlows, who narrates his adventures in the first person, as experiencer, witness and interpreter of the events. On a first reading of the novel, few will notice that Marlows point of view is subtly embedded in a more neutral and detached perspective of another anonymous narrator, in whose voice the narrative opens and ends. Unobtrusive as this narrative voice may be, to such an extent that it is almost ignored, being mistaken at first sight for Marlows, in the few pages in which it appears, it raises a lot of interpretation problems on account of the person and tenses used. Although the perspective is undoubtedly that of a third-person omniscient narrator, the narrators presence in the narrative is marked by the use of the personal pronoun we, which suggests his being part of the group of seamen on board the ship.

What we should observe is that Conrad does not simply alternate the two voices. He embeds the first-person narrators voice into a more comprehensive first-person narrative context, which resembles, in generalising and evaluating force, a third-person omniscient one. If asked about the point of view from which Conrads novel is narrated, most readers will yield to a first impulse and decree that Heart of Darkness is a first-person narrative, from the single perspective of one single narrating character. This is because Marlows story constitutes the centre of interest of the novel and Conrad narratively decided in favour of a more vivid, unmediated rendering of events. This is what makes the story attractive and easier to follow. The almost unnoticed presence of the more knowledgeable anonymous narrator only complicates things and reduces the degree of involvement that Conrad achieved by delegating narrative powers to Marlow. Yet, given Conrads stylistic accuracy and effectiveness, the explanation of this choice of technique will contribute to better understanding the overall meaning of the novel. There are at least two reasons for this narrative solution. First, Conrad did not want to give up the complete control of an omniscient-like narrator over the narrative. Marlow had been endowed with the critical faculties likely to make him function as a refined analyst of human nature. Yet, he was emotionally involved in the events he recounted, he was too subjective for his perspective to be unconditionally relied on. The more detached omniscient-like narrator was used in the beginning of the story to introduce Marlow and give the reader the size of Marlows potential as a narrator due to his ability to observe and judge things. He was also brought in the end of the story to endorse, in a way, Marlows findings. He was there to reinforce the conclusion Marlow could barely put into words. The story begins on board a cruising yawl in a London harbour and ends, after an incursion into the very bowels of the earth, into the darkness of the human soul, into the heart of the jungle, into the essence of evil, the very same place and moment of time. Though constructed in an apparently chronological succession, the novels main quality is its structural circularity

generated by the iterative temporal pattern. The novel begins and ends in the same point, Marlows highly subjective narrative being enveloped in the more objective and detached one of the anonymous narrator, a member of The Nellies crew. Conrad delimits the historical time the novel is set into not by mentioning a specific year, but by subtly alluding to the place and cultural context that moment of time belonged to. London, suggested by the presence of the Thames, is referred to as the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth, which, in association with the Companies, undoubtedly places the novel in the Victorian age and the days of the Second British Empire. The novelist purposely avoids the use of either of these two terms, which gives him the freedom to analyse, without bias or deference to the Victorian system, Britains, as well as other European countries, imperialist tendencies. By extension, Conrad sees expansionism and greed as inherent in human nature, as an inevitable counterpart of the splendour and wealth of civilisations. He thus transgresses chronological time and can afford to generalise on essential existential issues, by the mediation of the we omniscient-like narrator. More importantly, by his vacillation between the temporal and the timeless, between the particular and the general, he finds a way, not thought of before him, to challenge the very foundations of the system he seemed to praise. Only by understanding the movement Conrads narrative performs in and out of chronological time, can the reader make sense of the extremely subtle subversiveness of the novelists discourse. Conrad manages to assert and deny, to confirm and refute a stable, never contested and almost unanimously praised value system. He is very serious and ironic at the same time, but only on condition the reader can become aware of the two time dimensions. The following fragment from Heart of Darkness illustrates the temporal strategy Conrad uses in his novels. Significant events and outstanding figures of Englands history encourage generalisations on human nature. It is as if the Thames did not flow only into the sea of water, but also into the sea of time. The narrative moves forwards and backwards in time, from the present of the narrative to the past recorded by history.

The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea. It had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled the great knights-errant of the sea. *+ Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of the spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! (67)

Besides, the permanent alternation between the present of the narrative, rendered in tenses of the past time, and the present of Marlows story, rendered in tenses of the present time, creates the illusion of a time continuum and blurs the perception of time as chronology. This gives Conrad the freedom to formulate his own value judgements within a highly restrictive ideological framework. The same difficulty of the narrative pattern characterises Nostromo. Seemingly benefiting from the backbone solidity of a coherently and conventionally constructed plot, which would easily mislead the reader into reading the novel as one designed in perfect compliance with the nineteenthcentury conventions, Nostromo turns out to be highly modern in point of time handling. The obvious modernist opening is given by an intricate, sometimes difficult to follow, interweaving of two chronological schemes, one covering the history of the Republic of Costaguana, the other with reference to the three days of the Sulaco revolution. The shorter and more strictly delimited period is embedded into the longer and more indefinite one, although frequent movements from the one to the other are performed through the mediation of various characters and narrators voices. The reader is hardly given chronological certainties. In most cases, he is forced to move backwards and forwards in time, which accentuates the feeling of doubt already born out of the sense of the characters belonging to a relative value system. Anticipating the

modernist preference for subjectivity in time treatment, Conrads narrative displays a number of time layers mentally activated by the characters in the novel. In Part the First, for example, the time scheme is circular, denying the traditional convention of a simple linear plot development. Many occurrences are described and analysed, but with the action ending at the exactly the temporal point at which it began in the novel. The effect of these devices is to involve the reader intellectually. 15 The symbolic texture of Nostromo is exquisite and highly elaborate. It gives the novel the atemporal dimension that is absent in the apparent strict chronology of the story, whether the chronological aspects cover the extended history of the Republic of Costaguana or the detailed description of the three revolutionary days of Sulaco. Artfully combining the temporal and the timeless, Conrad made his work into an efficient instrument of investigation of truth, or life, or reality. His fiction is thus to be seen as a highly sophisticated form of knowledge. By devising a narrative technique capable of taking him always closer to the essence of the individual human being and of humanity, Conrad came to be undoubtedly acknowledged as a forerunner, or even initiator of modernism in terms of novel writing. Ant yet, it is precisely because of this oscillation between the timeless and the temporal that his work has constantly lent itself to controversy, being sometimes misunderstood, sometimes rejected altogether. Conrads novels are simultaneously novels about imperialism and about the human condition, about the individuals search for identity, about his propensity towards progress and self-destruction, about good and evil, about the darkness inherent in human greatness. In a typically modernist manner, Conrad plays with his readers horizon of expectations and draws him into the challenging game of coping with interrelated layers of significance.

15

Brian Spittles, op. cit., 4