gender in heart of darkness

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f MFS Modern Fiction Studies,Volume 48, number 2, Summer 2002. Copyright © for the Purdue Research Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved. THE WOMEN DO NOT TRAVEL: GENDER, DIFFERENCE, AND INCOMMENSURABILITY IN CONRAD'S HEART OF DARKNESS Gabrielle McIntire It is a story of the Congo. There is no love interest in it and no woman—only incidentally. —Joseph Conrad, "To Fisher Unwin." Despite Joseph Conrad's anxious confession to his publisher T. Fisher Unwin in 1896 that there would be "no love interest [. . .] and no woman" in Heart of Darkness, or at least "only incidentally," the novella he pro- duced two-and-a-half years later is radically preoccupied with women and the ways they influence his "story of the Congo" (199).Yet Conrad allows women scarcely any narratological or thematic attention in Heart of Darkness; instead, women appear to function primarily as ancillary details to Marlow's narration about Kurtz and his adventure to the "heart" of Africa. However, despite women's near invisibility—a half-presence that echoes the text's preoccupation with shadows and darknesses 1 they are an always-palpable presence in the background of the text.They tropologically illuminate the relationships of difference and distance that

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Gender in Heart of Darkness

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Page 1: Gender in Heart of Darkness

257McIntire

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MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 48, number 2, Summer 2002. Copyright © for the Purdue ResearchFoundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

THE WOMEN DO NOT TRAVEL:

GENDER, DIFFERENCE, AND

INCOMMENSURABILITY IN

CONRAD'S HEART OF DARKNESS

Gabrielle McIntire

It is a story of the Congo. There is no love interest in it and no

woman—only incidentally.

—Joseph Conrad, "To Fisher Unwin."

Despite Joseph Conrad's anxious confession to his publisher T. FisherUnwin in 1896 that there would be "no love interest [. . .] and no woman"in Heart of Darkness, or at least "only incidentally," the novella he pro-duced two-and-a-half years later is radically preoccupied with womenand the ways they influence his "story of the Congo" (199). Yet Conradallows women scarcely any narratological or thematic attention in Heartof Darkness; instead, women appear to function primarily as ancillarydetails to Marlow's narration about Kurtz and his adventure to the "heart"of Africa. However, despite women's near invisibility—a half-presencethat echoes the text's preoccupation with shadows and darknesses1—they are an always-palpable presence in the background of the text. Theytropologically illuminate the relationships of difference and distance that

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Conrad establishes between Europe and the Congo, and they figurallyrepresent the incommensurability between different ideologies and dif-ferent genres of speaking and knowing that are so central to the text'sstatus as a framed oral narration.

The women of Heart of Darkness have, in fact, suffered from a doubleinvisibility. First, Conrad invites his readers to participate in Marlow'sinsistence that the women are "out of it" (49) by figuring women aspalimpsestic, ghost-like, half-presences. At the same time, the women ofthe text have remained nearly invisible because so few critics have cho-sen to examine their roles; when women are considered, critics havefocused mainly on Marlow's lie to Kurtz's Intended. Once we begin looking(and we do have to look to find them), no less than eight women arepresent in Heart of Darkness: the Belgian aunt who secures Marlow a jobwhen his prospects for work in Europe are exhausted; the two womensitting on "straw-bottomed chairs, knitting black wool" who appear toMarlow in the Company offices as guardians of "the door of Darkness"(14); the "wife of the high dignitary" to whom Marlow's aunt recom-mends him for employment in Africa (15); the African laundress for theCompany's chief accountant, who keeps him looking like a "vision" or a"miracle" (21); the "wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman" (60) atthe Inner Station who "rushed out to the very brink of the stream" (66)as Marlow leaves with Kurtz on board his steamer;2 Kurtz's mother,who dies shortly after Marlow returns to Belgium (70); and finally, Kurtz'sIntended, the woman he might have married, whom he "intended" to behis final interpreter, and the woman to whom Marlow lies at the veryend of the text.3

What is going on with these women? Perhaps most clearly, Conradassociates women with the cultures and geographies they inhabit asthough by contiguous extension. The principal women of the text arealways positioned in transitional spaces in either the colony or themetropole, while they are decidedly static and unable to wander be-tween cultural, ideological, and national boundaries, as do Marlow andKurtz. In terms of Marlow's understanding of his voyage, the women areneither here nor there;or rather, they are only ever here or there, sincethey are powerless to transgress the limit that such a boundary implies.Mostly the women are sedentary, stationary, and confined to their ownterritories, metonymically embodying the separate cultural, racial, and

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geographic identities at play in the novel. The aunt sits in her upper-middle-class domestic parlor in Belgium as she sends Marlow off to hisadventure in Africa; the two knitting women sit in the outer room of theCompany offices and glance at the men en route to the Congo; and, atthe end of the text, Kurtz's Intended receives Marlow in a "lofty draw-ing-room" (72) where they both "sat down" for their mournful exchange(73). Even the movement Conrad grants to the African woman at theInner Station only further emphasizes her essential immobility: she strutsalong the river bank as she wails at Kurtz's departure, but she, too, isconfined to her own territory.

Placed as they are, Conrad's women reinforce a sense of extremeseparation between the colony and the metropole, and as such they arecrucial for guarding and preserving difference between Africa and Eu-rope. Kurtz's aunt embodies whiteness as well as the racist politics of theEuropean colonizing mission, while she also represents the ignorance ofthe sedentary white Belgian masses that do not and cannot participatein Marlow's knowledge of the "dark" continent. Marlow's aunt is evi-dently very comfortable, ensconced in privilege, and capable of seriousinfluence with people such as "the wife of the high dignitary" of KingLeopold's Belgian Congo. Before he leaves for Africa, Marlow finds her"triumphant" as she praises his work for the Company, and they drinktea during "a long quiet chat by the fireside." Marlow, however, onlymocks her flattery, considering her as a carrier for the ethics of thecolonizing mission. In one of the many moments in the text when Conradreveals his famous attention to the power of the written word, Marlowdeclares that his aunt has been sufficiently influenced by the "rot letloose in print and talk just about that time" to gain the sort of limited,ideologically saturated and very public knowledge of colonialism the Com-pany wishes the general populace to possess (15–16).4 Suggesting bothfamilial rootedness and European cultural supremacy, the aunt upholdsthe "decency," order, calm, and "triumph" of the metropole withoutmoving beyond the domestic space of her own parlor.5

Despite differences of race and place, yet with striking similaritiesin terms of her rootedness, the African woman at the Inner Station—the"wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman" who mirrors the "sorrowfulland" (60)—emblematizes and helps to inscribe the racist distinctionsthe text has already established between the colonial vision of native

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"savages" awaiting exploitation and the civilizing mission of the colonists,the white "emissar[ies] of light" (15). Marlow describes her in terms ofher physical beauty, her warrior-like posture and clothing, and her inde-cipherable language. Distinct from the ugliness of the white women whoknit in the Company's offices—the "slim one" with a "dress as plain as anumbrella cover" (13) and the "old one" with "a wart on one cheek"(14)—the black native woman is granted a sexual and valuable body: sheis "gorgeous," and laden with costly ornaments that "jingle and flash" asshe moves in her slow procession. But while her beauty and confidencedistinguish her, she too is restricted to her own territory, and Marlowdescribes her with a simile that links her to the land she represents, asthough by contiguous extension:

in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrow-ful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of thefecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, asthough it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrousand passionate soul.

She came abreast of the steamer, stood still, and facedus. Her long shadow fell to the water's edge. Her face had atragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and dumb pain mingledwith the fear of some struggling, half-shaped resolve. She stoodlooking at us without a stir and like the wilderness itself, withan air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose. (60)

In more than one sense her valuable body "mirrors" the body of Africaand its "dark" wilderness that the colonists are plundering as they scramblefor their hoards of ivory, for Marlow anthropomorphizes the wildernessat the expense of the woman by figuring her as co-extensive with place:both she and the land convey "sorrow," while the land itself "seemed tolook at her" as though it were looking at itself. Conrad thus bestows atleast as much agency on the land as he does on the woman herself.Nevertheless, the African woman is given an important signifying powersince as she struts along the river bank, holding "her head high" (60), sherepresents the absolute distance and incommensurability betweenMarlow's colonial river steamer and her people's land, which she guardseven as she later gives a fervent and sorrowful "send off" to Kurtz. Marlow

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tells his auditors that when she concluded her exchange of glances, "[s]heturned away slowly, walked on following the bank and passed into thebushes to the left. Once only her eyes gleamed back at us in the dusk ofthe thickets before she disappeared" (61). Marlow's orientalizing termshere invoke visions of a valuable and hunted animal retreating back to itscamouflaged zone of protection: she disappears into the thickets to re-sume her spatial identification with the "dark" territory. That is, just asMarlow earlier feminizes the wilderness that surrounds the isolatedcolonial stations along the Congo by describing them as "clinging to theskirts of the unknown" (36), the African woman here "passe[s]" backinto the feminized indecipherability of the unknown which defines her.6

In contrast, at no point in the text are the colonists themselvesidentified with the land of the Belgian Congo. Instead, the Congo alwaysremains a discrete territory, epistemologically distanced from the possi-bility of European identification. In this sense Conrad critiques the colo-nial project by suggesting that colonists are always interlopers on thespace of others. Frantz Fanon would propose many years later that "[f]ora colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete,is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and,above all, dignity" (44). Conrad perverts this relation between the landand its people by problematically implying a fantasy of extension be-tween race, gender, and territory to propose, in effect, that race andgender are the motherland. However, neither women nor natives evercontrol the land, nor does it grant them "dignity." Instead, the inscruta-bility of Africa's wilderness becomes another metaphor that repeatedlyreinforces both the literal silence of its inhabitants, and their imaginedignorance.

In an excellent article that does consider a range of female figuresin Heart of Darkness, Bette London suggests that in Conrad's text weneed to "consider gender and race as interlocking systems whose mutu-ally authorizing relationships support the dominant cultural perspec-tive" (235). The dominant cultural perspective is, of course, colonial im-perialism, and Conrad uses race and gender together to enforce thedistinct alterities between Belgium and the Congo and colonizer andcolonized that a model of colonial subjugation demands for its success-ful operation. In similar terms, Jeremy Hawthorn proposes that "in Heartof Darkness issues of gender are inextricably intertwined with matters of

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race and culture" (183). Even so Conrad's placement of women in thesefixed and liminal territories goes further than merely accentuating thedifferences and distances between Africa and Europe: it also emphasizesimportant incommensurabilities between different modes of knowing,speaking, and experiencing. That is, while Conrad's text explicitly marksout incommensurable differences between Europe and Africa and be-tween Europeans and those he calls "savages," these geographic andracial differences are sustained and enforced by the incommensurabili-ties in knowing and speaking that he establishes along gender lines.

Part of what is at stake in Marlow's narration and his brief butrecurring attention to women is a need to distinguish two entirely dif-ferent communities of people predicated on modes of knowledge andexperience. The male protagonists possess both empirical and abstractconceptual knowledge of the colonial enterprise in both Africa and Eu-rope—while the five major women of the text (Marlow's aunt, Kurtz'sIntended, the African woman, and the two knitting women in the Com-pany offices) apparently possess only conceptual knowledge of eitherAfrica or Europe. Because of his aunt's acceptance of the public ideolo-gies in support of colonialism, Marlow claims that women in general are

out of touch with truth [. . . .] They live in a world of their ownand there had never been anything like it and never can be. Itis too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up itwould go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confoundedfact we men have been living contentedly with ever since theday of creation, would start up and knock the whole thingover. (16)

Instead of reading his aunt's complicity with the Company project asmetonymically representative of the ethics of the colonizing mission—which he does elsewhere—he reads her indoctrination as a specificallyfeminine ignorance. This "world" of women that Marlow imagines is dis-tinguished by its non-relation to "truth" and its excessive concern withaesthetics over practicality. In contrast, the "men" Marlow refers to as"we" (effectively interpellating both his audience on the Nellie andConrad's early male readers) possess a sufficiently accurate version ofthe "facts" about the daily business of colonization to make theirs a worldthat does not "fall apart"—to use both Yeats's and Achebe's important

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phrase—at least not until well into the unimaginable twentieth century.7

The functional world that men have constructed abides by a utilitarianand empirically tested logic simply because it pursues its ends effectively.It recognizes such details as the "fact" that the Company is "run forprofit" (16). The world Marlow imagines for women, however, is distinctfrom that of the men who actually go to the "heart" of the "dark" conti-nent to set up their version of a "world" insofar as it is fixed, static, anddomestic: neither the women's world nor the women themselves canmigrate to different territories or do more than manage the incommen-surable differences of colonial order that Marlow and Kurtz confront asthey travel. That is, neither women nor Africans (regardless of gender)are capable of navigating between types of knowledge any more thanthey are capable of leaving the territory that defines them.

Just as his aunt functions for Marlow as a metonym for all womenwho are ignorant of the "truth" and are miserably "out of it" (49), hisprofound misanthropy for the population that remains in Europe cen-ters on his scorn for their ignorance, such that his misanthropy parallelshis misogyny. He comments scathingly and condescendingly on the peoplehe sees in the streets upon his return to Belgium: "They trespassed uponmy thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me anirritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly knowthe things I knew [. . . .] I had no particular desire to enlighten them, butI had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces sofull of stupid importance" (70). Accusing them of "trespass[ing]"—an of-fence he is guilty of in far more literal measure in the Congo—his dis-dain for the people he sees in the streets in Belgium occurs preciselybecause of their lack of knowledge, as we come to realize that the keyconflicts of Heart of Darkness are delineated along epistemological lines.

In a text that is on a very fundamental level about language and itslimits, narrativization and narratability, and speech and speakability, someof the terms Jean-François Lyotard sets up in The Differend: Phrases inDispute might help us diagnose how Conrad's constructions of gender,genres of knowledge, and modes of speech mutually reinforce the dis-tance and incommensurability between the male and female "worlds" ofHeart of Darkness. Lyotard suggests that a differend marks the failure orimpossibility of translating one rhetorical or speech genre into another.He writes: "The differend is the unstable state and instant of language

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wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannotyet be. This state includes silence, which is a negative phrase, but it alsocalls upon phrases which are in principle possible" (13). I want to pro-pose that the incommensurability between Marlow and the women ofhis narration reveals a differend that in turn elucidates the more generalincommensurability between modes of knowing and speaking in the text.As I will show, the women participate in and inhabit a different discursivegenre from men since they are most often silent, uncomprehending, andindecipherable. Lyotard further proposes—in terms that echo Conrad'sarticulation of the different "worlds" and "universes" of the sexes—thata differend describes "[i]ncommensurability, in the sense of the hetero-geneity of phrase regimens and of the impossibility of subjecting them toa single law [. . .]. For each of these regimens, there corresponds a modeof presenting a universe, and one mode is not translatable into another"(128). In Heart of Darkness, Marlow's narrative mode of speech presentsand reveals a "universe" in which women are untranslatable and quiteliterally unable to be told. Marlow is only capable of reading them asmetaphorical and meets a limit precisely because he cannot translatethem to the real.8

Later in the novella—after Marlow has claimed that his aunt andwomen in general are "out of touch with truth" (16)—he pushes thisexclusion further to insist, with an intratextual echo of his own words,that women should be "out of" his whole story. In the middle of hisdescription about his steamer's dangerous approach to the Inner Sta-tion he happens to mention "the girl," but then catches himself:

"I laid the ghost of his gifts at last with a lie," he began sud-denly. "Girl! What? Did I mention a girl? Oh, she is out of it—completely. They—the women I mean—are out of it—shouldbe out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful worldof their own lest ours gets worse. Oh, she had to be out of it.You should have heard the disinterred body of Mr. Kurtz say-ing 'My Intended.' You would have perceived directly then howcompletely she was out of it." (49)

Quite strikingly, his insistent repetition in this passage that women are"out of it" marks one of the few places in the text when Marlow inter-rupts his narrative with an aside to his auditors. Indeed, he stutters and

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falters in his narration most explicitly at the moments when he is unableto make women a part of his story. Here he "suddenly" stops the articu-late flow of his yarn to revise his own terms and preoccupations byasserting that women are not simply of a different world, but ought tobe "out of" the story "completely." His tangent is so filled with hesita-tions and dramatic caesuras that his very language betrays how unset-tling women are to Marlow's order of things: as figures that cannot quitemake their way into narration, or even into language, they resembleLyotard's differend because they present a problem—not simply of trans-lation, but of an epistemological incommensurability with Marlow's genreof telling and knowing.

His repeated insistence that women are "out of it" ought to alertus to the fact that they might be more important to his story than heallows. Marlow's repetitive insistence on women being "out of it" actu-ally seems to betray his own anxiety regarding women as guardians ofdifference and players in his own destiny, since they are, in fact, overlyimbricated in his story. He confesses this predicament to his fellow sail-ors with embarrassment: "would you believe it?—I tried the women. I,Charlie Marlow, set the women to work—to get a job. Heavens!" (12)Here he must not only repeat the personal pronoun, "I," but he feelscompelled to name himself to the others in order to stress his ownastonishment, to perform his alienation from ostensibly unusual behav-ior. Without his aunt's intervention, Marlow would never have gained hisappointment to the river steamer in Africa in the first place; his aunt is,quite significantly, partly responsible for originating his story.

Not only are women "out of touch with truth," but Conrad alsoconstructs the women of his story in terms of a different discursivegenre from the men in Heart of Darkness. In contradistinction to Kurtz's"folds of a gorgeous eloquence" (72), and Marlow's exquisite narrationto his fellow sailors that takes place with scarcely a pause, the women'snarration and their very narratability are severely restricted. Not a singlewoman has a name, women scarcely speak, and when they do speak theyare misunderstood, deliberately misled, or represented as profoundlylacking a comprehensive understanding of the events in which they par-ticipate. The only women of the text who are granted a decipherablelanguage are Marlow's aunt and Kurtz's Intended, and they are the onlytwo with whom Marlow converses. Johanna M. Smith argues that Marlow

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chooses not to "silence" the Intended and the aunt simply because he"needs them for his speech: by mocking the lack of worldly experiencewhich their words convey, he can recuperate that experience as a manlyencounter with truth. By having them feebly echo the case Kurtz hasmade for imperialism, he can reverse the powerlessness evinced in hisresponse to Kurtz's eloquence" (189). In contrast, the African woman ispowerfully granted sound—a point I will return to later—though forMarlow the sound of her wailing is closer to the "howl" of the "bush"(46) that eerily takes his crew by surprise than it is to language.

In The Differend one of Lyotard's principal concerns is to explorehow parties within discursive encounters involving heterogeneous "phraseregimens" are divested of the possibility of communicating, and are there-fore "reduced to silence" (10). While he is interested especially in thephilosophy of language and its discursive systems, he also includes a deeplyethical and political dimension to the differend, claiming, "What is atstake in a literature, in a philosophy, in a politics perhaps, is to bearwitness to differends by finding idioms for them. In the differend, some-thing 'asks' to be put into phrases, and suffers from the wrong of notbeing able to be put into phrases right away" (13). Without framing hisargument in feminist, queer, or racial terms, Lyotard goes very far indescribing how institutional and societal modes disallow certain formsof speech or genres of expression by not making space for the possibil-ity of their idiom. That is, a differend occurs not simply when voices arenot heard, but because those voices cannot be heard. The voices Lyotardwrites of are as unintelligible to the more powerful discourses that frameand contain them (whether these are legal discourses, or whether theyinvolve an exchange in which one of the parties—sometimes a priori—isrefused the chance for self-articulation) as the women in Heart of Dark-ness are to Marlow's narration.9

For the majority of the text we do not and cannot know whywomen partake so completely of a different epistemological frameworkthan the men, and it seems that Marlow is quite happy to allow thisdifference (which generates a differend) to remain unchallenged. He hasvirtually no desire to explore the incommensurabilities between theirsystems of knowledge and his own, establishing himself instead as an"Enlightened" reader, as Bette London points out, and "the voice of cul-tural authority" (241). That is, he is capable of distinguishing between

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epistemes while confidently remaining within his own. While his aunt ismaking him "quite uncomfortable" with her naïve praise of the Company'sproject, for example, lauding their efforts to "wean those ignorant mil-lions from their horrid ways," Marlow only ventures a "hint that theCompany was run for profit" (16). He stops short of a full explanation ofhis views, which he narrates to his male auditors, and he only weaklyexpresses his discomfort through the always-ambiguous gesture of ahint. Marlow thus not only allows his aunt to misread his own ambiva-lence about the Company's capitalist ventures, but he seems to wish thismisreading upon her. He considers her, as with the Intended at the end,incapable of knowing.

If we move backward into Heart of Darkness with the teleology ofMarlow's lie in mind, the narration's dependence on a complex series ofdifferends becomes increasingly apparent. Not only is Marlow unable toread women—effectively structuring them as a differend—but he alsodisdains women because of their perceived inability to recognize theincommensurabilities at the heart of the darkness of Africa. Perhaps themost shocking example of the distance Conrad creates between Marlowon the one hand and women and Africans on the other occurs whenMarlow meets Kurtz's Intended after his voyage to Africa and finds him-self unable to translate the excess of his experience into intelligible words.Despite Marlow's stated disgust for lies (29), and his claim to have beensearching both for "the truth of things" (17) and "truth stripped of itscloak of time" (38), he chooses to lie when the Intended asks him forKurtz's final words. The phrase Kurtz repeats as he dies—"The horror!The horror!" (68)—becomes for Marlow another metonym for theuntranslatability and inexplicability of his experience of Africa. They areKurtz's words, simultaneously and ambiguously alluding to his horror ofhis own tyranny, his horror of a continent in miserable subjugation, andpossibly to the horror of his vision of death, but Marlow makes them hisown. As Michael Levenson suggests, Kurtz's phrase involves "the produc-tive confusion of two realms: personal agony indistinguishable from politi-cal catastrophe" (5). Kurtz's repetition becomes Marlow's private refrainfor Africa, which he refuses to share with Kurtz's Intended, and presum-ably shares for the first time when he narrates it to his fellow sailors.

Even when he does narrate his tale to his male audience, we shouldkeep in mind that Marlow relates it in a trance-like state, with a "hesitat-

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ing voice" (11), as though he only finally tells it (or confesses it) in spiteof himself. Indeed, the frame-narrator describes the group onboard TheNellie in terms suggestive of altered or religious states of consciousness,thus supplementing Marlow's story with the impression that an occulttransmission of knowledge is taking place: the listeners themselves "feltmeditative," and, in terms that orientalize Marlow for a change, beforeMarlow begins his story he "sat cross-legged right aft, leaning against themizzenmast. He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, a straight back,an ascetic aspect, and, with his arms dropped, the palms of hands out-wards, resembled an idol" (7). At the close of his story Marlow is evenmore deeply associated with a religious and, in this case, a philosophicfigure : "Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose ofa meditating Buddha" (76).

Sometimes Marlow is, in fact, quite self-consciously aware of theauthority of his position and his voice, claiming that "for good or evilmine is the speech that cannot be silenced" (38). In terms of Lyotard'smodel of "phrases in dispute," the silence of women stands out evermore starkly because of its extreme opposition to Marlow and Kurtz'scommand over language. Marlow speaks directly from the metropolitancenter of the British Empire—his narration literally takes place on thefluid, shifting territory of the Thames, just upriver from London—whilehe repeatedly reminds us how important his English-ness is to his ad-ventures. The English language provides the common linguistic groundbetween him and Kurtz, allowing Marlow to converse fluently with Kurtz,a man who is known for "his ability to talk, his words—the gift of ex-pression" (48). Marlow remarks:

This initiated wraith from the back of Nowhere honouredme with its amazing confidence before it vanished altogether.This was because it could speak English to me. The originalKurtz had been educated partly in England, and—as he wasgood enough to say himself—his sympathies were in the rightplace. His mother was half-English, his father was half-French.All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz; and by and byI learned that, most appropriately, the International Society

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for the Suppression of Savage Customs had entrusted himwith making a report, for its future guidance. And he had writ-ten it too. I've seen it. I've read it. It was eloquent, vibratingwith eloquence. (50)

Kurtz's familial genealogy of partial Englishness is what allows him tocommunicate with Marlow, just as Marlow's national English and conti-nental family connections allow him to encounter Kurtz at all. Appropri-ately, Kurtz is something of a cultural hybrid: his roots lead to a mixedEuropean ancestry (Marlow does not narrate what the "other" parts ofKurtz's descent are), while he apparently had travelled to Africa out ofan "impatience of comparative poverty" (74).

Conrad thus links Kurtz and Marlow through the particularity oftheir shared background and experiences, through their association withthe "new gang—the gang of virtue," since they were both recommendedby "the same people" (25), and through the fact of their wandering. Marlowis "a seaman, but he was a wanderer too." He has a marked differenceeven from his fellow sailors to whom he relates his tale because, unlikethem, he "still 'followed the sea'" (9). To reinforce Kurtz and Marlow'sparallel need for adventure and travel, Conrad later intratextually ech-oes the narrator's observation that Marlow is a "wanderer" by describ-ing Kurtz as a "wandering and tormented thing" (65). Marlow is a dis-placed Englishman who must rely on a female relative in Belgium tosecure him a job, while Kurtz is a displaced citizen of all of Europe.

Kurtz and Marlow's intimacy then springs up in part from theirmutual love of what Édouard Glissant calls "errantry." Errantry, forGlissant, is "not rhizomatic but deeply rooted: in a will and an Idea" (41),and in contradistinction to mere "wandering," errantry aligns itself withthe abstract telos of an Idea. Before Marlow even meets Kurtz he is toldthat Kurtz "had come out equipped with moral ideas of some sort" (33).Marlow, in turn, wills to understand the incomprehensible Idea of Af-rica—and, ultimately, of Kurtz himself—and he fantasizes that travel willprovide him with this knowledge. What Marlow actually comes to "know"during his voyage is unclear, and Conrad seems to want to leave themarkers of truth or discovery ambivalent. Just as Marlow conveys thatbefore he knew Kurtz "[h]e was just a word for me" (29), Marlow ago-nizes over the fact that his narration may appear to his audience assimply an inchoate string of words. He asks: "Do you see him? Do you

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see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tellyou a dream" (30). Kurtz and Marlow "see the story" because they pos-sess a shared vision of the atrocities of deep colonial Africa in whichthey both participate in different ways.

At the same time, Kurtz and Marlow's all-male community of knowl-edge is semi-marginal and always on the move. They seem to participate,at least tentatively, in what Jean-Luc Nancy calls "being in common." This"has nothing to do with communion, with fusion into a body, into aunique and ultimate identity that would no longer be exposed. Being incommon means, to the contrary, no longer having, in any form, in anyempirical or ideal place, such a substantial identity, and sharing this (nar-cissistic) 'lack of identity'" (xxxviii). Neither Kurtz nor Marlow has thetype of static identity that Marlow criticizes in women, and concomi-tantly, they shift locales endlessly precisely because they cannot discoverwhat Nancy calls one's own "ideal place." Even when it appears thatKurtz may just have discovered his "ideal place" by tyrannically control-ling a station far enough down river to put him beyond the precincts ofCompany control, Marlow enforces his retrieval mission to dislocateKurtz from his usurped African territory. The "lack of identity" they shareis predicated on both their errantry and on Marlow's narcissistic under-standing of Kurtz's final words, as Marlow seems to believe that only hecan interpretively grasp the brilliant logic in Kurtz's pathetic cries thatpoint to no particular referent. Following Nancy's terms, however, theircommunity ultimately fails because of Marlow's excessive identificationwith Kurtz and his homoerotic desire to possess the "truth" singly aboutKurtz, and frantically exclude it by lying to Kurtz's Intended.

Marlow's misogyny then depends on an important distinction be-tween "wanderers" and those who stay at home. In contrast to thehomosociality of Marlow and Kurtz and the ways in which they are nar-rated as wanderers who become "friend[s]" (62) that partake of an "un-foreseen partnership" (67), the women of the text remain geographi-cally, ideologically, and culturally stationary and isolated. While Heart ofDarkness is critical of the grand narratives of colonialism, pointing outthe "darkness" at the heart of the colonial project and critiquing theempty desires of the Company "pilgrims," Conrad nevertheless valo-rizes Marlow's form of wandering. Yet Marlow does not travel to Africato understand another culture, but rather to satisfy his childhood "han-

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kering" to explore what had been "the biggest—the most blank" (11)space on the world map, even though "It had got filled since my boyhoodwith rivers and lakes and names" (11–12).10 Unlike the (problematic)birth of anthropology, when, as Édouard Glissant proposes,"[u]nderstanding cultures then became more gratifying than discoveringnew lands" (26), Marlow's voyage is rooted in a childhood fantasy ofdiscovering the unknown promised by the unwritten cartography of theblank map. His adult voyage to the Congo is his attempt to actualize thisabstract desire for knowledge by supplementing it with the empiricalexperience that will allow him not simply to name but to narrate thisblank space. As Conrad writes in "Geography and Some Explorers," oneof his autobiographical Last Essays, "the honest maps of the nineteenthcentury nourished in me a passionate interest in the truth of geographi-cal facts and a desire for precise knowledge" (qtd. in Kimbrough 145;emphasis added). His concerns with honesty, truth, facts, and knowledgeare precisely the issues that the women of Heart of Darkness help toilluminate by their very exclusion from these spheres.

While women do not wander in Heart of Darkness, and Conraddoes not grant them the possibility of grasping the Idea of colonial ex-ploration, the women are nevertheless crucial for sending off the men totheir travels. In one of the important send-offs of the text, where womenare placed in liminal positions yet are unable to transgress the bound-aries between here and there, Marlow exchanges meaningful glances withtwo mysterious women who knit black wool in the Company's headoffices. These women occupy a transitional space in the labyrinthine head-quarters: they are outside the waiting room and the inner office, yetinside the Company, and they are some of the last faces the young "fool-ish" men will see before leaving for Africa (14). Inhabiting an ambiguousposition, these women are at once comforting and sinister. On one level,their knitting seems more appropriate to a domestic space of semi-leisure than to a space of business, and the women provide a last glimpseof "home" for the men who cross their threshold, complete with a catwho sits on the older woman's lap. But, at the same time, they are remi-niscent of the three fates of Greek myth who weave and unweave desti-nies regardless of individual wishes.11

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Significantly, Marlow's exchange with the two knitting women oc-curs in glances, without words—just as the indecipherable send-off bythe African woman at the Inner Station—while it leaves an indelible markon his consciousness that involuntarily returns to haunt his memory inAfrica. He describes his visit in these terms:

[The older woman] glanced at me above the glasses. The swiftand indifferent placidity of that look troubled me. Two youthswith foolish and cheery countenances were being piloted overand she threw at them the same quick glance of unconcernedwisdom. She seemed to know all about them and about metoo. An eerie feeling came over me. She seemed uncanny andfateful. Often far away there I thought of these two, guardingthe door of Darkness, knitting black wool as for a warm pall,one introducing, introducing continuously to the unknown,the other scrutinising the cheery and foolish faces with un-concerned old eyes. "Ave! Old knitter of black wool. Moriturite salutant." Not many of those she looked at ever saw heragain—not half—by a long way. (14)

Marlow must quite literally navigate his way through the glances of thesewomen to approach the center of the Company, while, sitting on theoutskirts of the Company offices, the women also function as the Euro-pean gateway to the subjugated Congo. They are strangely "unconcerned"and distinctly unattached to Africa. The women quite incommensurablyknit wool, as though for a cold climate, indicating their indifference tothe fates of the men who pass them by. Nevertheless, Marlow conjec-tures that the women knit "black wool as for a warm pall," inviting us toimagine that they are knitting feverishly because they sit at the door ofdeath, preparing palls to cover the dead as they return from the heat ofAfrica to the chill of Europe.

Linguistically, too, Conrad links them to the colony with his wordplay on the "feverish[ ]" (14) pace with which they undertake their task.In practical terms, however, they are doing the wrong thing—racing againsta time that both means everything and nothing once Marlow reachesAfrica, where the lack of basic materials (rivets) delays his retrieval ofKurtz for months, rather than hours or days. Apparently, as Conrad showsus, the colonial system of extraction was so profitable that it could af-

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ford to be badly organized. The two women eerily possess a commensu-rate and fateful knowledge of the men who pass them by, and they ex-hibit an ironic efficiency in their "feverish" pace to provide materials forthe dead. Are these women, then, figures of knowledge? Is Conrad offer-ing a deconstruction of Marlow's terms whose logic states that womenare "out of touch with truth"? As with the other women of the texttheir knowledge can only be conceptual, but it nevertheless leans to-ward experience since it can be none other than the knowledge of theprobability of death. This "fateful" knowledge momentarily links themwith the community of men who pass through their offices, and providesthe closest encounter between Marlow's versions of "male" and "fe-male" forms of knowledge that the text will allow.

The Latin Marlow uses to apostrophically address the women—"Ave! [. . .] Morituri te salutant" (14)—conveys strangeness, difference, andthe solemnity of death in a tongue belonging to the early Roman "con-querors" to whom he refers at the beginning of his narration (10). Marlowand these knitting women are, in this specific moment, separate commu-nities, functionally communicating because of their mutual access to theknowledge of death and a foreboding sense of "Darkness." Paradoxically,the women here disclose both a differend and a moment of commensu-rability: their gendered community is opaque and unsettling to Marlow,yet Marlow's phantasmatic Idea of the "Darkness" of Africa momentarilyappears to correspond with their Idea of Africa as a place that sendsback the dead. That is, the women who "knit," "glance," and "introduce"have a peculiar epistemological access to the "Darkness" that they guard,though their imagined Idea will necessarily be incommensurate with theparticularity of the lived experience that unfolds for Marlow. Marlow'sencounter with these women is disturbing enough that this image laterreturns to his memory, as though from the repressed, to "obtrude" itselfon his thoughts precisely as he crosses the boundary from the river (hissteamer—as the metropole framed by the dark continent) to the bank(the native territory, the unknown, the unexplored) in pursuit of theescaped Kurtz. As Marlow remembers remembering the women—in amoment that reminds us that this is a text about memory—they nolonger seem as apposite to the Darkness that they guard, and Marlow, ineffect, takes back his earlier intimation of their knowledge: from thevantage point of experience the older woman appears only within the

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context of some fleeting "imbecile thoughts" as "a most improper per-son to be sitting at the other end of such an affair" (64).

Marlow disdains European women because they seem debilitatinglyunable to know difference; they are unable to conceive of the prolifera-tion of differends that mark Kurtz's summation of "the horror." At thesame time, Marlow extends his critique of the limits of women's knowl-edge to Africans, and specifically to African women. He places the twoAfrican women that he encounters—the laundress and the woman atthe Inner Station—into similar categories of non-knowledge as the Eu-ropean women. The laundress of the "Company's chief accountant" (21),just as the "savage" "fireman" who stokes the furnace aboard the riversteamer (38), is "useful" only insofar as she has "been instructed" (39),for she possesses no real relationship to subjectivity or the power at-tendant with critical knowledge. Yet Marlow admires the fruits of herlabor, and he comments at length on details of the accountant's appear-ance, for which she is responsible:

I met a white man in such an unexpected elegance of get-upthat in the first moment I took him for a sort of vision. I sawa high, starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowytrousers, a clean necktie, and varnished boots. No hat. Hairparted, brushed, oiled, under a green-lined parasol held in abig white hand. He was amazing and had a pen-holder behindhis ear. I shook hands with this miracle [. . . .] Yes. I respectedhis collars, his vast cuffs, his brushed hair. (21)

Does this not remind us of the terms Marlow criticizes his aunt forusing, when she imagines Marlow as "[s]omething like an emissary oflight, something like a lower sort of apostle" (15)? Is Marlow not guilty ofthe same type of aestheticizing that he complains makes women inca-pable of setting up a world? What is Conrad ironizing? Perhaps Marlow'sneed to segregate women's knowledge is rooted in his wish to distancehimself from a recognition that their "feminine" way of experiencing theworld at times infects his own epistemology. The women's knowledgethat he observes is alternately "out of touch with truth," "fateful," in-structed, and also incomprehensible; in other words, women's knowl-edge is very much like Africa itself for Marlow.

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The woman at the Inner Station also seems to possess and mark aknowledge of her own, insofar as she performs the sentiments of hertribe in her "articulate" send-off to Kurtz. She is an untranslatable fixtureof her geographical locale who nevertheless possesses an uncanny knowl-edge that Marlow himself cannot comprehend. In terms reminiscent ofthe two knitting women, she appears to Marlow as one who "looks"(60) and "glances" (61) at the Company men who pass before her eyes.She guards her territory as a sentry: her demeanor is "warlike" (60), shehas a "helmeted head" (66), and, like the younger knitting woman whowalked "back and forth introducing," she walks along the bank "fromright to left [. . . .] with measured steps" (60). Marlow notes, withoutadditional commentary on its significance, that she moves in a counter-clockwise direction, perhaps insisting on her inversion of Western Euro-pean order, although her movements are ordered and precise.

While Marlow tries to decipher her movements, her glances, andher shrill cries—all gestures outside of language for him—he is forcedto confess that she remains incomprehensible. Just after he first narratesher appearance on the river bank, associating her at once with danger,Marlow relays the harlequin's account of an episode involving her andKurtz a few days earlier: "Luckily for me, I fancy Kurtz felt too ill that dayto care, or there would have been mischief. I don't understand . . . . No—it's too much for me. Ah, well, it's all over now " (61). Her incomprehen-sibility leads the harlequin, too, to the stuttering and hesitating silence ofa differend where, as Lyotard suggests, one epistemological and discur-sive genre is "not translatable into another" (128). The next day whenthe steamer pulls away with Kurtz on board, the African woman shoutsout "something" and "all that wild mob took up the shout in a roaringchorus of articulated, rapid, breathless utterance." Marlow asks Kurtz ifhe understands their cries, and Kurtz merely responds, "Do I not?" (66)Kurtz, however, does not translate for Marlow, and Conrad leaves themeaning of their cries undefined. Perhaps they are shouting Kurtz's name,or something equally impossible for Kurtz to misunderstand. All that isclear for Marlow, and hence for us, is the fact that their protest againstKurtz's departure occurs through sound and language. They are power-less now to take up a physical fight, and hence their protest must comethrough words alone. Yet Marlow is again left unable to read either womenor Africans with any precision. And these failures of communication do

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not stem simply from a lack of translation—which does not signify adifferend for Lyotard (157)—but from Marlow's interpretation of theirworld as more commensurate with the "heavy, mute spell of the wilder-ness—that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast" (65) than with hisown genre of knowing.

Indeed, women are frequently figured very much like the wilder-ness itself in Heart of Darkness, as Conrad consistently associates womennot only with the land they inhabit as guardians, but also, in the case ofAfrica, with the silence, shadowiness, and indecipherability they sharewith the colonial territory. Both women and the wilderness provide abackdrop to the narration, a figurative ground on which the male actionis superimposed. From the beginning of his tale Marlow consistently andrepetitively describes the Belgian Congo as a mysterious and dark placefull of silences, participating in a European fantasy that the African wil-derness was, as Ian Watt argues, "by definition an extreme example of aplace where the light of civilization has not come; and Africa, for this andother reasons, long figured in European thought as the Dark Continent"(Conrad in the Nineteenth Century 250). Early on Marlow remarks, "thesilent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck meas something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently forthe passing away of this fantastic invasion," while, like a mother, "thewilderness without a sound took [the beaten "nigger"] into its bosomagain" (26; emphasis added). Later on the wilderness is "great, expectant,mute" (29; emphasis added), a "rioting invasion of soundless life" (32; em-phasis added), and "[a]n empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrableforest" (35; emphasis added). These associations of the wilderness withsilence and muteness carry right through the text. As such, the wilder-ness is figured as a major marker of Africa's subjection: a geography,space, and history that quite literally cannot be heard, yet which never-theless possess a mysterious, indecipherable "hidden knowledge" that is"mute" but "with an air of whispering—Come and find out" (16). Andthis is where the wilderness is, in fact, a step up from women: it pos-sesses secrets worth discovering, while women's silence is representa-tive of nothing more than lack and absence.

Interestingly, Conrad associates Kurtz as well as women with thewilderness. When Marlow's allegiances are beginning to shift to Kurtz hetries to disclaim his new loyalties to his auditors, insisting that "I had

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turned to the wilderness really, not to Mr. Kurtz who, I was ready toadmit, was as good as buried. And for a moment it seemed to me as if Ialso were buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets" (62). Ofcourse Marlow does not literally choose the wilderness; if he choosesany "wilderness" at all, it is only the "wilderness" of human experienceand its extremes. And he makes his revulsion from the wilderness clearin a series of dizzying and slippery tropes that disclose an intense corpo-real fear of being swallowed up by this "silent" land that is figured somuch like the women of the text. He moves rapidly from claiming anallegiance to the "wilderness" to imagining not just Kurtz but he himselfas "buried" by the wilderness, as though together—in a homoeroticburial—they would be entombed by the land that fascinates them. Nordoes he simply envision a scene of interment in the African ground;rather, he imagines "a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets," as thoughthe earth itself were a repository of hidden knowledge, ready to incor-porate their two bodies that have thirsted for its secret.

At the very end of the text, Marlow's desire for non-contact be-tween his epistemological framework and women's in general is high-lighted when he chooses to lie to Kurtz's Intended. Marlow's desire tovisit her has been piqued by Kurtz's "small sketch in oils" of the In-tended—"a woman draped and blindfolded carrying a lighted torch"(27)—that Marlow first sees at the Central Station before he meetsKurtz. The portrait of a deliberately blinded woman who neverthelessfunctions as a carrier of light draws together Marlow's general charac-terization of women as blinded, ignorant, and yet oddly capable of illumi-nating the way into darkness, offering a parallel with his aunt's procure-ment of his position and with the ways the women of the story illuminatethe epistemological structures and concerns of Heart of Darkness.12 Al-ways one step away from truth and knowledge, women can reflect theirlight, but not know where they walk. Importantly, the painting also oper-ates as a symbolic point of currency for Marlow since together withKurtz's letters, the blinded figure of liberty provides a connecting bridgebetween Marlow and the Intended, and gives him a reason for visitingher. Marlow chooses to visit her on the pretence of returning what isrightfully hers—to "give her back her portrait and those letters my-self"—while he simultaneously admits that his move is made equally outof "[c]uriosity," and a desire "to surrender personally all that remainedof [Kurtz] with me," including "his memory" (71).

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When Marlow does visit the Intended, he is capable only of re-turning the portrait and her own letters, not of giving her Kurtz's finalwords; he can return things, but he cannot meet her with language. Theirdialogue takes place in a chiaroscuric setting of half-lights and shadows,and as elsewhere in the novella Marlow describes the Intended in termsthat suggest she is co-extensive with her physical environment. The roomthey sit in has a "tall marble fireplace [that] had a cold and monumentalwhiteness. A grand piano stood massively in a corner with dark gleamson the flat surfaces like a sombre and polished sarcophagus" (72), andthe room grows increasingly "dark" as their conversation about Africaand Kurtz progresses. The Intended herself is still in mourning and dressed"all in black," yet she is also aligned with whiteness; she possesses a"pale head" (72), "fair hair," a "pale visage," and she "seemed surroundedby an ashy halo" (73).13

The Intended is predictably eager to hear all that Marlow has totell about Kurtz's last days. But even though Marlow has already pro-nounced that "as it turned out [he] was to have the care of [Kurtz's]memory" (51), he is unwilling to share either memory or truth with thiswoman. If Marlow is to insist on meeting Kurtz's Intended only in thelanguage of lies, it appears he must foreclose communication altogether.Rather than giving the Intended the dignity of a conversation, he mimicsher phrasing in a bizarrely sadistic wrestling match that belittles herdesire for knowledge of her once future husband.14 In answer to herstatement, "You knew him well," he echoes her in profoundly homo-erotic language, "I knew him as well as it is possible for one man to knowanother" (73). His echolalia effectively parodies her desire for knowl-edge about nothing less than knowledge itself by claiming a supreme (andpossibly sexual) form of knowledge for himself. He has already conveyeda stuttering erotic homage to Kurtz that insists upon their eternal "inti-macy," claiming that in his first words to Kurtz Marlow said the "rightthing," just at the "very moment when the foundations of our intimacywere being laid—to endure—to endure—even to the end—even be-yond" (65).

As their exchange continues he finds her responses deeply trou-bling and finally bars communication with her altogether, recognizing inthe "appealing fixity of her gaze" (73) the same language of "glances" heso detests in other women. As Marlow is struggling to piece words to-

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gether in the hesitating language of discomfort, claiming "He was a re-markable man [. . . .] it was impossible not to . . . . ," the Intendedinterposes "Love him." This statement works simultaneously as a com-mand, as an assertion of her own love for Kurtz, and as an attempt tomeet Marlow on his own discursive level by literally completing his sen-tence to join his genre of praise. By echoing him in the language of loveand desire, however, the Intended pushes his remembrance of Kurtz toits passionate and epistemological limits: her conclusion is precisely thesort of thing Marlow does not want to hear from a woman; it is far toonear to the "truth" about his attachment to Kurtz. Marlow experiencesthis interpolation as a terrifying shutting down of his voice, feeling thatshe was "silencing me into an appalled dumbness" (73). This is, of course,a distinctly feminine position in Heart of Darkness, and, along with thesudden revelation of her uncanny knowledge, produces a discomfort fromwhich Marlow will be unable to recover.

After a few more moments of an awkward, hesitating dialogue inwhich Marlow expresses a palpable jealousy for the Intended's devotionto Kurtz and her assurance of their mutual love, Marlow tells her that hewas with Kurtz "[t]o the very end [. . . .] I heard his very last words," butthen suddenly "stopped in fright." The Intended, of course, asks him, withchildlike repetitiveness, "Repeat them [. . . .] I want—I want—something—something—to—to live with" (75). Again she is asking to participate inhis language, to know the words he carries as memory. Marlow, however,is incapable of speaking. Rather than tell her the truth of Kurtz's aston-ishing last words, and thus uphold his promise to Kurtz to communicatehis story to her on a decipherable level, Marlow reinforces their differ-ence by refusing to meet her in the same discursive territory of "truth."Instead of telling the Intended that Kurtz died muttering "The horror!The horror!"—a statement that Marlow interprets as a "supreme mo-ment of complete knowledge" (68) that "had the appalling face of aglimpsed truth" (69)—he tells her that Kurtz died muttering her (un-specified) name. As such, Marlow ends his story on a differend by direct-ing her away from knowledge to leave her believing in a false romanticvision of Kurtz's final words. Instead of allowing for the positivity ofdifference and otherness, Marlow refuses to risk the sort of incommen-surability that might flourish if he tried to convey "the horror" to theIntended. Clearly he believes it would be impossible for her to under-

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stand his community of errantry and experience, and he chooses to closeoff an anticipated differend rather than to allow its free play: in effect, hewill guard the difference between male and female forms of knowledgeas vigilantly as the two knitting women guard "the door of Darkness."

His lie also binds him irrevocably and phantasmatically to Kurtzsince it makes him the sole inheritor of Kurtz's story. By choosing to lieto the Intended, Marlow meddles with authorship and authority (he is astoryteller, after all) to impose his own revisions on Kurtz's final state-ment, thereby effectively authoring Kurtz's story himself. His lie uncan-nily marks the moment at which he is closest to Kurtz, yet simulta-neously this refusal to honor Kurtz's contract for truth instantly dispelstheir community and their "Being in common." His lie to the Intended—which Marlow has already prematurely confessed to his auditors mid-way through his narration when it slips from his lips as a kind of prema-ture ejaculation of the intention of the whole story—consequently marksthe moment when Marlow has least control over language, narration, orhis search for "the truth of things."

To mark the closure of his story, then, Marlow refuses the possibil-ity of relation by purposefully remaining fixed in a differend as a meansof resisting the frightful contact of knowledge between different modesof thought. In his mind we can hear him insisting that women do nottravel, and they "live in a world of their own." His refusal to relate to theIntended is tantamount to claiming a continually shifting epistemologicalstatus that no one but himself can discern. By lying to her, and in the splitmoment that informs his decision to do so, he apparently finds her name(and perhaps the name of "women" in general) translatable and com-mensurable with the incommensurability of "the horror." Within hisown mind he might even believe that he is telling her a kind of truth,leaving her ignorant of the "facts" of what really happened, but affirmingto himself the affinity between women and "The horror!"

Notes

I wish to thank Laura Brown, Eduardo Cadava, Jonathan Culler, Ellis Hanson,Molly Hite, Jodie Medd, Natalie Melas, Daniel Schwarz, and Hortense Spillersfor offering both encouragement and critique at various stages of writingthis paper.

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1. Since its initial publication and early reviews, critics have found Heart ofDarkness excessively atmospheric, as well as structurally and adjectivallydifficult, shadowy, and undecidable. Ross Murfin offers an excellent over-view of some of these early- and mid-century critiques, pointing out thatin 1903 John Masefield thought it consisted of "too much cobweb" (98); in1936 E. M. Forster considered it "a little too fuzzy" (98); and in his highlyinfluential work, The Great Tradition (1963), F. R. Leavis concurred with Forster,also stressing its "overwhelming sinister and fantastic 'atmosphere'" (Leavis173).

2. Even though it has become something of a critical convention to call thiswoman "Kurtz's African mistress," she is never explicitly named or desig-nated as such. Heteronormative biases have led critics to assume a sexualrelation, but there is no substantial evidence in the text to indicate theprecise nature of her relationship with Kurtz. Instead of characterizingher as his "mistress," then, I will simply refer to her as the woman at theInner Station, or the African woman.

3. Beginning with the opening words of the text—"The Nellie, a cruisingyawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest"(7)—every vessel that carries Marlow from one land to another is alsogendered as feminine. While Conrad's use of feminine names for ships isof course quite conventional for the period, it nevertheless underscoresthe fact that he leaves every woman of his text unnamed. In pointing thisout, we might note, though, that Heart of Darkness also participates in amore general absence of naming: other than Marlow and Kurtz, charac-ters are known by function rather than by proper name. This tendencyextends equally across boundaries of race and place. Marlow's audiencefor his tale consists of the "Director of Companies," the "Lawyer," the"Accountant," and the unnamed frame-narrator; while in Africa he speaksof figures like the "Manager," the "chief accountant," and the "helmsman."Even so, Conrad articulates gender differences through his unnaming sincethe men tend to be referred to by title or function, while the women areusually referred to by function in terms of their relation to men: Marlow's"aunt," Kurtz's "Intended," Kurtz's "mother," the "laundress" for the chiefaccountant. Furthermore, geographic place names are rarely specified ei-ther: neither the Belgian city nor the Belgian Congo is named; instead wehear only of "a city that always makes me think of a whited sepulchre"(13), and, just once, of "Africa" (11). The Congo itself is never named;when Marlow describes his childhood fascination with its representationon the map, he recalls only that it looked like "an immense snake, un-coiled" (12). When he arrives in Africa after his ocean voyage, he simplyremarks that he finally "saw the mouth of the big river" (18). Conrad was

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well aware of this absence of naming place, at any rate, and in the sameletter quoted above to T. Fisher Unwin, he notes that in his manuscript,"The exact locality is not mentioned" (qtd. in Kimbrough 199).

4. Conrad gives an exquisite disquisition on the relation of language to art inhis "Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus." Here he argues against theeroding power that "careless usage" can exert upon language, insistingthat "it is only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfectblending of form and substance; it is only through an unremitting, never-discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approachcan be made to plasticity, to color, and that the light of magic suggestive-ness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the common-place surface of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages ofcareless usage" (xlix).

5. Ian Watt reads Marlow's misogyny as specifically directed to "women ofthe well-to-do and leisured class to whom his aunt and the Intended, andpresumably the womenfolk of his audience, belong." Treating Conrad'stext in the context of Victorian ideology, Watt argues that "Marlow's per-spective, in fact, assumes the Victorian relegation of leisure-class womento a pedestal of philanthropic idealism high above the economic and sexualfacts of life" ("Heart of Darkness and Nineteenth-Century Thought" 114).

6. Conrad invokes the valences of racial passing through his choice of words,which therefore ask us to consider for whom or for what he implies theAfrican woman might have been "passing." Does having an autonomousand authoritative presence as a woman in this text necessarily entail aform of passing? When the African woman "passed" back into the wilder-ness, is Conrad suggesting that she "passes" back to her "real" identity?

7. Edward Said is generally critical of the "politics and aesthetics" of Heart ofDarkness, which "are, so to speak, imperialist" (24); yet he proposes that"[s]ince Conrad dates imperialism, shows its contingency, records its illu-sions and tremendous violence and waste (as in Nostromo), he permits hislater readers to imagine something other than an Africa carved up intodozens of European colonies, even if, for his own part, he had little notionof what that Africa might be" (26).

8. In "Lying as Dying in Heart of Darkness," Garrett Stewart takes this pointeven further to argue that "both" women of the text (in this case theIntended and Kurtz's "mistress") "copresent in the narrator's mind's eye,are emanations of Marlow as well as of Kurtz" (328), and he proposesthat the Intended's "black-draped mourning is Kurtz's darkness visible"(331). It would be going too far to pursue this line of thought further and

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propose that the women are never more than Marlow's symbolic projec-tions, but Stewart is right to point out the consistent manner in whichwomen function as a kind of tabula rasa on which Marlow's preoccupa-tions are staged. As we will see, the women also take on qualities from thesettings that surround them.

9. In her recent study, Conrad and Women, Susan Jones points to a fascinatingletter George Gissing wrote to Joseph Conrad in 1903 in which Gissingclaims there is a pressure of speech behind the actual silence of Conrad'swomen: "Wonderful, I say, your mute or all but mute women. How, inSatan's name, do you make their souls speak through their silence?" (qtd.in Jones 21). His point is idealistic and misogynistic at the same time,though he does touch upon some of the work these silent, or nearly silent,women do in Conrad’s text.

10. As Robert Kimbrough reminds us, it was a common feature of the nine-teenth-century colonial imagination to conceive of unexplored territo-ries as "blank" or "white" empty spaces. Kimbrough writes that Sir Rich-ard Francis Burton, for example, went in 1856 "to search for the sourcesof the Nile and to map what [he] called the 'huge white blot' of CentralAfrica" (146).

11. In a further link between women and discursive patterns in Heart of Dark-ness, we should note that both Hermes and the three Fates created thealphabet, although they invented only the first five vowels and two conso-nants (Graves 65, 182). That is, the Fates are partially responsible for thesigns that make written language possible.

12. Earlier in the story, when Marlow is first describing the trip toward theInner Station on the river steamer, he associates himself with someonewho is "blindfolded." Defending his navigational skills he claims he "didn'tdo badly either since I managed not to sink that steamboat on my firsttrip. It's a wonder to me yet. Imagine a blindfolded man set to drive a vanover a bad road. I sweated and shivered over that business considerably"(36). When he later invokes the image of the "blindfolded" woman heagain offers the possibility to his readers that he and the women of hisstory are more intertwined—even metaphorically—than he would liketo admit.

13. See Natalie Melas's "Brides of Opportunity: Figurations of Women andColonial Territory in Lord Jim" for a brilliant discussion of the ways inwhich Conrad's Manicheistic dualisms echo structures of colonialism.

14. Henry Staten reads this encounter as a sado-masochistic power conflictbetween Marlow and the Intended where Marlow possesses a "desire toinflict mourning on a woman and then to drink of her grief" (163).

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