Conrad and Masculinity

130 Conrad and Masculinity
him with me to that oblivion which is the last word of our
common fate.
(155)
What is most striking here is perhaps the extent of Marlow’s fantasy
identification with Kurtz, combined with a fantasy of possessing him,
body and soul (points to which I shall return). Equally significant,
however, is the subtle shift made by ‘I wanted to give that up too’,
where ‘that’ seems to refer, ungrammatically, both to ‘his memory’
and to (the portrait of) ‘his Intended’. The shift is from the idea of
giving up a bit of Kurtz to the woman (treating her as a possible subject
of knowledge/possession) to the idea that she is herself one of Kurtz’s
possessions, to be given up to ‘oblivion’. This shift seems to be
achieved via the portrait, which Marlow sees as a reified and idealized
image of truthfulness itself:
One felt that no manipulation of light and pose could have
conveyed the delicate shade of truthfulness upon those features.
(154–5) 21
In a metonymic slippage, giving up the portrait becomes giving up the
woman herself. The woman becomes the portrait, a portrait which
Marlow interprets as a visual image of truth, not an image of a mind
capable of being told the truth. The Intended becomes one of the
things, like Kurtz’s station, body, soul and so on, which Marlow is ready
to give up, although he has never possessed them, except in fantasy. 22
Telling stories about someone is not the usual way of consigning
them to oblivion: the Intended is surrendered, less to ‘oblivion’ than
to Marlow’s fantasies about her and to his male listeners. This brings
us back to the nature of the male bonds in ‘Heart of Darkness’. Nina
Pelikan Straus argues that
In Heart of Darkness women are used to deny, distort, and censor
men’s passionate love for one another. Projecting his own love on
to the form of the Intended, Marlow is able to conceal from himself
the dark complexity of his own love—a love that strikes him with
horror—for Kurtz.
(EI, 134)
This version of the familiar idea of a ‘doubling’ between Marlow and
Kurtz in terms of passionate love between men is best understood via