Conrad and Masculinity

124 Conrad and Masculinity
by those other than their intended hearers or readers. For example,
Verloc’s confession to Inspector Heat, and Heat’s response, are overheard
by Mrs Verloc, with dramatic consequences. On another level,
Marlow’s story-telling in ‘Heart of Darkness’, addressed to his listeners
on the Nellie, is ‘overheard’ by the reader. This placing of us as readers
in relation to the storytelling act materially alters our response.
A third important mode of communication in these works is lying.
It may at first sight seem perverse to describe lying as the communication
of knowledge. However, a believed lie involves the circulation
of false knowledge, while a lie which is perceived as such, whether
tentatively or with confidence, provides the hearer with some
complex information both about the substance of the lie and about
the liar. The ambivalence which obviously applies to lying in fact
extends to confession and overhearing as well. I shall suggest that
both of these are likely to involve misinterpretation. Thus in respect
of all three modes, what is circulated is not simply knowledge as such,
but forms of knowledge and ignorance, interpretation and misinterpretation.
Confession typically involves a complex interaction of the impulse
to reveal and the impulse to conceal, of articulation and repression of
knowledge. Both impulses, however, are communicative in effect,
since the confessional situation constitutes the listener or reader as
one who interprets the repressed or unstated as well as the stated. This
view of confession is familiar from the psychoanalytical process, in
which the analysand comes to sessions in order to speak but often
communicates with silence, and from the religious confession, in
which what must be spoken is, almost by definition, what one might
wish to conceal. Rousseau illustrates this mingling of motives at the
point in his Confessions where he first embarks on the subject of his
sensuality and sexual preferences. Describing the awakening of his
sensuality in response to his first experience of corporal punishment,
he claims that his embarrassment at this revelation has only been
overcome sufficiently for him to write it down by his sense of its
didactic value: ‘The magnitude of the lesson to be derived from so
common and unfortunate a case as my own has resolved me to write
it down.’ 16 Since, however, what he has to confess is his pleasure in an
experience conventionally regarded as in itself humiliating and
embarrassing, the reader is liable to suspect that he enjoys the embarrassment
of the confession as well.
Overhearing is similarly ambivalent, since many utterances are
aimed at a specific audience. Marlow’s narration in ‘Heart of Darkness’