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Lying as Dying in Heart of Darkness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Garrett Stewart
Garrett Stewart*
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
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Abstract

As thematic actions, dying and lying divide up Conrad’s narrative in Heart of Darkness between main story and controversial coda. Steeped in the formulas of literary fatality, including the symmetries of ironic reprisal and the summarizing retrospect of last words, Kurtz’s death is modeled on fictional expectations so as to secure its dark transmissible import, only for that import to be betrayed by the supposedly beneficent mendacity of Marlow’s lie in the final interview with Kurtz’s Intended. Marlow as reader or interpreter of tragic meaning degenerates to Marlow as false author of a euphemizing fiction. The essay traces the complex preparation for Kurtz’s death, including the suicide and murder of earlier surrogates for Marlow, as these scenes establish an interpretive framework by which to assess a coda that becomes, for a narrator repulsed by the “flavour of mortality in lies,” yet another indirect but self-indicting death scene.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 95 , Issue 3 , May 1980 , pp. 319 - 331
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1980

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References

Notes

1 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: Norton, 1963). Subsequent references are to this edition. The quotation from Lord Jim is also from the Norton Critical Edition, ed. Thomas C. Moser (New York: Norton, 1968).

2 Leavis, The Great Tradition (London, 1948; rpt. New York: New York Univ. Press, 1964), p. 177.

3 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 101.

4 Guérard, Introd., Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer, Signet Classic ed. (New York: New American Library, 1950), p. 11.

5 Ellmann, Golden Codgers: Biographical Speculations (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 18.

6 Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, 1978).

7 Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966), p. 113.

8 Paul L. Wiley, “Conrad's Skein of Ironies,” originally published in Kimbrough, ed., p. 226.

9 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (1927; rpt. New York: Harper, 1962), p. 284.

10 Krieger, The Tragic Vision: Variations on a Theme in Literary Interpretation (New York: Holt, 1960), p. 155.

11 Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975), pp. 104, 130.

12 Hay, The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Study (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1963); see esp. Hay's treatment of Marlow's lie, pp. 150–54.

13 Daleski, Joseph Conrad: The Way of Dispossession (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 75.

14 Letter to his publishers, William Blackwood, 31 May 1902; quoted by Daleski, p. 73.