Conrad and Masculinity

128 Conrad and Masculinity
hysteria with which Marlow overloads his description of the meeting.
The effect is cumulative, and therefore not easily rendered by quotation,
but consider the following examples:
The sound of her low voice seemed to have the accompaniment of
all the other sounds, full of mystery, desolation, and sorrow, I had
ever heard—the ripple of the river, the soughing of the trees swayed
by the wind, the murmurs of the crowds, the faint ring of incomprehensible
words cried from afar, the whisper of a voice speaking
from beyond the threshold of an eternal darkness.
(159)
I heard a light sigh and then my heart stood still, stopped dead
short by an exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable
triumph and of unspeakable pain.
(161–2)
This cry bears comparison with Linda’s cry at the end of Nostromo
which, as I suggested in Chapter 4, is part of a repression of the
homosocial. In ‘Heart of Darkness’ the rhetorical excess would
suggest that highly rational explanations of Marlow’s motives – or
even highly coherent explanations of his behaviour in symbolic
and/or unconscious terms – may distract us from a key fact: the
combined panic and excitement produced in Marlow and in the text
itself by the proximity of a woman to an utterance (Kurtz’s last words)
which evokes, by its very hollowness, an idea of ultimate truth. As the
above quotations show, this proximity calls forth a veritable barrage
of those epistemologically arousing place-markers: ‘mystery’, ‘incomprehensible’,
‘beyond the threshold’, ‘eternal darkness’: the
unspeakable in pursuit of the inconceivable. Famously, or rather infamously,
Marlow has earlier claimed that truth is generally
unavailable to women :
It’s queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a
world of their own, and there had never been anything like it, and
never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set
it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded
fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day
of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over.
(59)