Conrad and Masculinity

Epistemology, Modernity and Masculinity 133
imperialist project. What were his ‘unspeakable rites’ (118), bearing in
mind that they involved ‘various lusts’ (131) and that Marlow apparently
cannot bring himself to be specific about them? Cannibalism?
Perhaps, but Marlow seems ready enough to discuss that in relation to
the Africans on board the river steamer. Human sacrifice? The heads
on stakes might imply this, but, again, Marlow is frank enough about
these, and finds them an expression of a ‘pure, uncomplicated
savagery’ (132) which is more tolerable than the imagined details of
the ceremonies involving Kurtz. Some form of magic? The witch
doctors who appear on the shore are made to appear pathetically
powerless. All of these activities might be involved, but none seems
adequate to explain the mystique of the unspeakable attributed to
Kurtz’s practices. The conclusion, I think, has to be that what Kurtz
has done is precisely the non-specified or unspeakable: it is less any set
of actual actions than a symbolic location of taboo-breaking. As such,
and in the historical context of the turn of the century, it can hardly
fail to evoke the homophobic taboo of ‘the love that dare not speak its
name’. 24 Perhaps the closest that Marlow comes to identifying the
unspeakable is when he finds it intolerable to hear about ‘the ceremonies
used when approaching Mr. Kurtz’ (131–2), which seem to
involve crawling. This is one of a number of references to the idea of
idol-worship, and suggests the harlequin’s adoration and idealization
of Kurtz, which Marlow mocks but in some degree comes to share. The
focus of horror is thus on Marlow’s intense emotional desire to meet
Kurtz and identification with him after his death, although this focus
is masked by the projection of the ‘horror’ onto the imagined primitive
of Africa. Marlow’s own feelings for Kurtz (tinged as they are with
idol-worship) are themselves the horror. It is in sexual terms, as well
as in terms of imperialist exploitation, that the darkness which
Marlow imagines he finds in Africa is reflected back into the heart of
the culture inhabited by Marlow and his respectable male listeners.
In her discussion of the characterizations of Claggart in Billy Budd,
Sedgwick notes that two elements give some ‘semantic coloration’
(EC, 95) to the enigmatic terms used of the master-at arms. The first
is the series of ‘damning ethical designations’ for which I have
already identified a parallel in ‘Heart of Darkness’. The second is ‘the
adduced proximity ... of three specific, diagnostic professions, law,
medicine, and religion, each however said to be reduced to “perplexing
strife” by “the phenomenon” that can by now be referred to only,
but perhaps satisfactorily, as “it”’ (EC, 95). This phenomenon is
Claggart’s ‘wracking juncture of same-sex desire with homophobia’