Conrad and Masculinity

126 Conrad and Masculinity
subject of knowledge. The knowing subject is opposed to: (1) the ignorant;
(2) the known, the object of knowledge; (3) the unknowable.
‘Heart of Darkness’ is a story about the gaining and passing on (or
failure to pass on) of knowledge and about relationships between
men. This knowledge is rhetorically structured in terms of the transgression
of boundaries; the supposed insight of Kurtz’s final words,
‘The horror! The horror!’ (149), is a result of his having gone beyond
various notional boundaries – of ‘civilization’, of self-restraint, of
taboo, finally of death, of his having ‘made that last stride ... stepped
over the edge’ (151). Marlow’s sharing of something of this insight is
possible because he too has ‘peeped over the edge’ (151). Marlow
attempts to pass on this (partial) knowledge to his male listeners
through the medium of language, but again this is only partly possible.
Marlow’s confidence that ‘you fellows see more’ is set against his
sense that ‘No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the lifesensation
of any given epoch of one’s existence—that which makes its
truth, its meaning’ (82). Many versions of what this knowledge is are
possible: knowledge of the self (as Marlow suggests at one point)
(150), of the Other, of the unconscious, of the violence and oppression
of colonialism, of the corruption of European civilization, of evil
within human nature. I would suggest that, while at the realist level
the story makes, for example, a (limited) critique of colonialism, at the
symbolic level the ‘truth’ which is at its centre is primarily an empty
signifier, generated by what Sedgwick terms ‘representationally
vacant, epistemologically arousing place-markers’ (EC, 95). Examples
are ‘the incomprehensible’ (50), ‘dark places’ (48), ‘misty halos’ (48),
‘subtle and penetrating essence’ (82), ‘dream’ (82), ‘The horror!’ (149),
‘a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable
terrors’ (151), ‘an immense darkness’ (the last words of the story, 162).
These terms, in other words, generate a rhetorical and narrative intensity
around the idea of something to be known, without ever
specifying what that something is. Sedgwick points out the associations
of such a technique with a homophobic discourse which treats
same-sex desire as something which cannot be spoken of. In ‘Heart of
Darkness’ the technique also produces racist and sexist effects, since
Africa, African people and women are drawn into this symbolic black
hole. The empty signifier is empty only in terms of the story’s symbolic
self-understanding; ideologically, it has a history and a meaning.
To say that ideologies underlie the text would be the wrong
metaphor, borrowing its own figurative register of hidden metaphysical
truth. Rather, ideologies structure the text, so that it may be