Sounding the hollow heart of the West: X-rays and the technique de la mort1
MARTINE HENNARD DUTHEIL DE LA ROCHÈRE
Je me demandais, je me demande encore en
quelle langue, sinon celle des morts,
cela l’avait-il traversé et s’était-il écrit.
PHILIPPE LACOUE-LABARTHE, Phrase
Just as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy shared ‘so many common paths’2 in spite of the irreducible singularity or differences of their work, as Derrida immediately hastens to add in his introduction to Typography (1989), one cannot fail to notice the ‘singular proximity’ of Joseph Conrad’s and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s writings on the darkness that – they both sensed – lies at the heart of Western ‘civilization’, understood as the myth through which the West has constituted itself. In ‘The Horror of the West’, Lacoue-Labarthe justifies his admiration for Heart of Darkness as one of the greatest texts of Western literature on the grounds of its ‘mythical power’ and, indissociably, on ‘what constitutes it as an event of thought’ (112). He points out that it is impossible to separate them, because
the myth of the West, which this narrative [récit] recapitulates (but only in order to signify that the West is a myth), is, literally, the thought of the West, is that which the West ‘narrates’ [raconte] about what it must necessarily think of itself, namely. . .that the West is the horror (112).
While keeping in mind the need to resist easy assimilations, I wish to suggest that Lacoue-Labarthe’s reflections on the technique de la mort (119) (i.e. both the technology of death and death’s mechanism, technique or techne – craft, art, practice) that he sees at work in Heart of Darkness, can be productively put in relation with Conrad’s figuration of the hollow heart of Western man by means of the newly discovered X-ray technology. To be sure, Conrad’s critique of the monstrous lie underlying the colonial machinery must be distinguished from Lacoue-Labarthe’s take on techne as a response to Heidegger’s legacy in the aftermath of the Holocaust.3 And yet, despite their many differences, they share a common recognition of writing as a mode of thinking through the role of techne that cuts across traditional boundaries between poetic and philosophic inquiry. In Derrida’s words, they both show that ‘the experience of thought is also a poetic experience’.4
Specifically, they see the tale as a privileged form through which this experience can be articulated. While the anonymous narrator of Conrad’s novella famously stresses the unique nature of Marlow’s story as distinct from other sailors’ yarns, because it alone has the ability to illuminate the darkness as an effect of refracted light, the word tale significantly appears untranslated in Lacoue-Labarthe’s 1996 paper on Heart of Darkness.5 ‘The Horror of the West’ opens with the philosopher’s emotional and intellectual shock provoked by David Warrilow telling ‘Conrad’s tale’ (111) in a theatrical representation, or rather a reading. The tale, which retains both senses of histoire and récit, énoncé and énonciation, histoire vécue and conte (fairy tale, fiction, lie) in English, becomes by virtue of its semantic ambiguity and suggestiveness a ‘story to think with’, as I have tried to show elsewhere.6 Conrad’s framing of the tale further contributes to keeping its enigmatic and paradoxical quality through complex structuring devices and ‘a risky, problematic style’,7 to borrow Lacoue-Labarthe’s and Nancy’s distinction between philosophical thought and totalizing/totalitarian myth. The narrative indeed centres on, imitates/mimics but also undoes the rhetoric of myth analysed in this important essay, and confronts the horror that Kurtz both represents and utters, albeit in the form of a paradox:
a truth too difficult to enunciate directly, too heavy or too painful—above all, too obscure. For Conrad, it is, of course, obscurity itself: the darkness, the horror. And it is this truth, the truth of the West, to which he seeks to bear witness in such a complex way (113–14).
Tellingly, the evidence of the truth value of Conrad’s tale appears to Lacoue-Labarthe as an effect of Warrilow’s voice and memorable performance, possibly because it re-inscribes human presence and physical suffering (denied, disavowed or ignored by Heidegger) at the core of the theatrical experience which, as Lacoue-Labarthe recognized, is also an experience of thought. Its interpellative force is heightened by the great actor’s fragile but intense and compelling presence on the brink of death, in an uncanny re-enactment of Marlow’s efforts to come to terms with Kurtz’s last words. And yet the staying or haunting power of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a tale that circulates in the fiction and outside it, passing between seamen, actors, philosophers and critics, fosters the desistance that Derrida, borrowing it from Lacoue-Labarthe, uses to characterize what brought them together and set them apart.8 Desistance, as that which is both shared and unique about each of them, becomes a precondition for dialogue, because Conrad’s text, and Lacoue-Labarthe’s response to it, resonates differently in each of us, and every time we return to it (now with Lacoue-Labarthe’s voice echoing in ours). In this sense, Lacoue-Labarthe’s deliberately experimental reading of Heart of Darkness enacts a disarticulation, to cite Derrida again, that ‘traces out merely the silhouette of a unity, and more of a rhythm [or a shared insight] than an organic configuration’ (italics mine).9
Bearing this desistance or disarticulation in mind, Heart of Darkness explores the idea of a journey that reconfigures geography as anatomy, and whose body politics can be productively examined in light of Lacoue-Labarthe’s metaphysical/political reading of Kurtz’s ‘absence of any proper being’ (116). The imagery of physical hollowness in Conrad’s text thematizes and enacts the disclosure of a fundamental absence of essence, or human substance, in Kurtz’s demented, dematerialized and yet all too powerful voice. In turn (and by contrast), it is through Warrilow’s memorable (re)telling of the story in a voice marked by terminal illness that Lacoue-Labarthe realizes most fully the dehumanization of Western man articulated by Conrad’s text through its system of mediated narratives: ‘Warrilow’s exhausted voice, in its sovereign detachment, prompted an emotion of thought which I daresay remains, to this day, incomparable’ (111). Indirection, mediation and recitation (in the interplay of speech and writing, live performance and retrospective reflection/meditation, story and commentary) thus become the very means through which the emotional truth of fabulation can be communicated, shared and variously engaged with.
Translation represents yet another modality of transmission, dialogue and response, and from the very beginning, in a to-and-fro movement between English and French. The occasion of Lacoue-Labarthe’s piece is the (Irish-born) British actor’s memorable reciting of Heart of Darkness in translation, which the French thinker engages with in the same language, except for the word tale that remains – as remainder of the translating process, and reminder of the original text – in English; in turn, the piece is translated into English by Nidesh Lawtoo and Hannes Opelz for this volume, thereby responding to the intellectual and ethical imperative of pursuing the dialogue with Conrad and Lacoue-Labarthe, the novelist and the thinker, together. Translation is not only an effective means to counter the horror/drama of disappearance by contributing to the afterlife of Lacoue-Labarthe’s important work on the mutually illuminating interplay of literature and philosophy. It also stresses the role of cross-linguistic and intercultural exchange as fundamental to creative thought, keeping in mind that English was Conrad’s third or fourth language. Translating across languages, cultures, discourses and disciplines thus becomes an appropriate way of paying tribute to Conrad and Lacoue-Labarthe as writers working across boundaries and testing limits.
In this chapter, I try to relate Lacoue-Labarthe’s critique of techne with Conrad’s representation of colonial figures as hollowed out bodies reminiscent of X-ray images. My argument is that the newly discovered technology serves to capture/symbolize the inhumanity of Western man in Heart of Darkness that Lacoue-Labarthe identifies as ‘the horror’. Linking Lacoue-Labarthe’s reflections on techne and the technology of X-rays that arguably informs Conrad’s figuration of the state of Western man at the turn of the century, opens up the deeply Lacoue-Labartian question of the possibility (or impossibility) of revelation. Specifically, Lacoue-Labarthe seems to imply that Heart of Darkness reveals the ‘essence’ or ‘truth’ of the West. The techne of X-rays that symbolizes Western technological progress and alleged superiority ironically gives access to its internal hollowness or lack of substance (or proper being). And yet, what is revealed is simply a mimetic refraction of the ‘truth’ hidden inside (luckily, luckily, says Marlow).10 Against the totalizing myth of a triumphant science, or political/religious ideology, or even ultimate meaning, the novelist and the thinker propose a mode of attention to what is intuited indirectly through an image, a turn of phrase, a tone of voice, the complaint of nature and an open form of writing that invites dialogue.
Body politics and the heart of the matter
Conrad’s anatomy of empire draws on the familiar land-as-body analogy to represent the African landscape as an organic and feminized space penetrated by force and destroyed by those who pretend to cure it of its ills.11 Several critics have observed that the trope functions in the production of Manichean allegories that legitimized Western power, control and possession of foreign lands, but it is now generally admitted that Conrad also uses it against itself. My contention is that the figuration of Africa in terms of body is part of a complex strategy through which Conrad articulates and enacts his critique of colonial binaries and hierarchies. A careful examination of the ‘body politics’ of Heart of Darkness, especially when read in the company of Lacoue-Labarthe, refutes accusations of racism and sexism put forward in some classic critical accounts of Conrad’s novella.12
The widespread use of the land-as-body analogy represented as an opening up of the supposedly Dark Continent by European forces, notoriously led to the production of feminized and racialized images of Africa in the Victorian period to legitimize imperialist violence. Influenced by the heritage of the fear of the feminine and inflected towards imperialist concerns when projected upon the colonial context, these images combined the loathing of the female link to nature with anxieties about the degenerative influence attributed to foreign lands. However, instead of naturalizing colonial domination through the conventional practice of feminizing Africa, the descriptions of the jungle in Heart of Darkness expose the violence of the invasion, rule and exploitation of foreign lands by European forces. Quoting Benjamin, Lacoue-Labarthe observes: ‘if nature could speak, it would be in order to lament [se plaindre] (colonial exploitation being, first and foremost, the exploitation of nature)’ (116). He identifies the ‘clamour’ of the Africans expressing the profound sadness and pain of exploitation and slavery with the lamenting voice of nature, as opposed to the Western ‘civilized’ voice of techne. Although this conflation could be seen as problematic, the central image of a journey to the beating heart of Africa alters the significance of the trope since the heart, however inscrutable, is displaced onto the space of the jungle and its inhabitants, and seen as the site of a humanness (and an ability to feel) that Western man has lost in the colonial venture. Lacoue-Labarthe observes that Heart of Darkness is built on the striking contrast between images of an animated, suffering nature and its disembodied, objectified European invaders, Kurtz first and foremost among them: Lacoue-Labarthe’s account of Kurtz as a hollow figure, a man without qualities (after Musil) who lacks proper being. Kurtz is presented ‘as being nothing himself’; or as being ‘no one [personne]’ (116). His eloquence is systematically linked to the ‘barren darkness of his heart’, to his being ‘hollow at the core’, to the void that is within him or, more exactly, the void that he ‘is’. This is why he is only ‘a voice’ (116). In this sense, Kurtz represents techne as the gift of speech (or art) divorced from being and body, and bent on destruction. What he ultimately expresses is therefore the recognition of his own horror; he is a mere figure, which carries for Lacoue-Labarthe the implications of hollowness and brutal will to power. He is nobody, hardly a body any more, but the mere incarnation of a monstrous idea. By contrast, the African jungle is seen as a feminized and suffering being endowed with a will of its own. The theatrical framing through which Marlow’s tale is told and the paradoxical truth that it communicates confirms the importance of the physical dramatization of its paradoxical message (a truth that can only be sensed, and uttered, indirectly), let alone the (moral, political) imperative to transmit it in the recognition that ‘To say that the horror is “him”—Kurtz—is to say that the horror is us’ (117). Because it reveals that ‘it is its own horror that the West seeks to dispel [faire disparaître]’ (119).
As the title of Conrad’s novel intimates, when read in light of Lacoue-Labarthe’s essay, the actual source of horror lies within the heart of Western man symbolized by Kurtz. Although the ‘mythomaniac’ Marlow reproduces the fraught association of landscape and (feminized) body, he foregrounds the sinister aspects of the analogy when he describes the ravaging of Africa. The impact of colonial exploitation on the natural environment is seen as a ruthlessly draining of its life force, the Europeans bleeding the land dry. Before embarking on his inland journey, Marlow witnesses the extent of the destruction when he reaches the Company’s Station. Littered with ‘pieces of decaying machinery’ (63–4) and ‘rusty rails’ (64), the Station is represented as a junkyard for the grotesque and useless symbols of Western technological advancement. In Lacoue-Labarthian terms, techne is here centrally associated with the horror, destruction and inhumanity of the colonial enterprise, causing the lament of the land and its inhabitants. Marlow describes the carving up of the land, ransacked merely as an assertion of Western control and masculine mastery over nature. Walking through this wasteland, Marlow avoids ‘a vast artificial hole’ (65) and nearly falls into ‘a very narrow ravine, almost no more than a scar in the hillside’ (65) in which ‘a lot of imported drainage-pipes’ (65) have been dumped. Read in the light of the land-as-body analogy, this description symbolically evokes the rape of the African land by the European invaders. The question of gender thus constitutes an important supplement to Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading of the exploitation of nature via techne.
The figuration of the African land as body is not only used to stigmatize the brutality of colonial invasion, but also to question the oppositional logic informing colonial discourse. During his upriver journey, Marlow represents the surrounding landscape as a space that resists and undoes conventional boundaries. The image of a journey within an embodied landscape collapses the distinction not only between inner and outer space, but also between (masculine, European) self and (feminine, African) other. This could be put in relation with Lacoue-Labarthe’s claim that two voices structure the tale, in counterpoint with each other: ‘the indistinct “clamour” of the savages (the chorus) and that, obviously [bien entendu], of Kurtz’ (114). By reconfiguring geography as anatomy, Conrad suggests that what was initially perceived as a radically alien space defies and unsettles the binary oppositions and hierarchies underlying colonial rhetoric and the long tradition of Western thought that Lacoue-Labarthe himself draws on (including the opposition of physis and techne, West and ‘other’, civilization and savagery, etc.). By both redeploying and subverting one of its central tropes, Conrad articulates a critique of the language of distinction and exclusion by which the European subject has sought to maintain relations of power, and more generally made sense of himself and the surrounding world. The appeal to music (voice, sound, song) in Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading may be an attempt to move beyond these oppositions, since the opposition between inside and outside breaks down when he describes Kurtz’s body as a hollow cavity (almost a musical instrument) through which the voice of the jungle resonates.
Marlow represents the jungle as breathing and as resonating with the heart’s rhythmic pulsing of blood into the body. The narrator mentions ‘the tremor of far-off drums’ (70) at the beginning of the journey, and later the metaphor of the ‘throb of drums’ (144) suggests his greater proximity to the heart. But Marlow’s anticlimactic meeting with Kurtz at the Central Station ends in the recognition of the opacity of the heart ‘as the site where discourse meets its limit’.13 Kurtz, Marlow’s dark double, is accordingly described as a man whose eloquence hides ‘the barren darkness of his heart’ (147), although ‘his was an impenetrable darkness’ (149) which confounds understanding, like that of the jungle itself. The conflation of inner and outer space is again acknowledged retrospectively, when Marlow compares or confuses the rhythmic beating of the ‘savage’ drums with a human heartbeat, possibly his own. One of Marlow’s most vivid memories, which keeps haunting him after his return to Europe, reveals the disturbing presence of the ‘other’ within the self: ‘the beat of the drum, regular and muffled [was] like the beating of a heart – the heart of a conquering darkness’ (155–6). By collapsing common distinctions between body and space, self and other, the narrator recognizes the presence of uncanny similarity at the heart of difference. Although short-lived, this confusion evidences a destabilization of the essentialist, racist and sexist base of colonial discourse deriving from logocentric philosophy.
But the true originality of the writer’s figuration of the inhumanity of the colonial venture lies in images of the empty body probably inspired by the recent discovery of X-rays, whereby the agents of empire are emptied of their physical substance and reduced to insubstantial shadows. Despite Marlow’s resorting to clichés in his descriptions of the jungle, he simultaneously sees it as a site of resistance against appropriation and possession as an embodied space that reasserts life over colonial and masculine mastery. In deliberate contrast to the indifferent or cynical colonizers, the personified jungle displays a whole range of attitudes, emotions and feelings, captured in the idea of the ‘heart’ of the land. Marlow’s representation of a feminized landscape thus reworks traditional associations of the feminine with organic life and the abject, as well as with the realm of feelings and emotions. But it is interesting to note that, pace Achebe, Conrad’s Africa does not serve as a foil to a celebration of white masculine values (intellect, reason, self-control, progress, science, civilization, etc.), except on a very superficial level.Rather, through his treatment of male bodies as lifeless or hollow set in strong contrast with the living body of Africa, Conrad expresses the dehumanization of Western man, the vacuity of colonial rhetoric and the destructive violence of the imperial age. Heart of Darkness notoriously revolves around the darkness and possible absence of a heart, on a literal, symbolic and even textual level, because it resonates with (and reveals?) what Lacoue-Labarthe aptly calls a ‘hollow myth’ (118). Marlow’s journey to the heart of Africa brings no knowledge and no certainties other than the recognition of the ‘heartlessness’ of Western man revealed in the colonial context, as opposed to the beating and inscrutable heart of the jungle and, by extension, of the African woman.
In counterpoint to representations of a suffering and feminized nature, Marlow’s X-ray vision of hollow colonial officials and ‘shadow’ men whose bone structure alone is visible, reflects the impact of breakthrough developments in science on the novel. Seizing on the imaginative possibilities opened up by the discovery of X-rays, Conrad makes it an apt metaphor for Marlow’s ability to ‘see through’ the civilizing mission and its cynical representatives. The innovative X-ray imagery reveals the vacuity of colonial discourse and expresses a profound anxiety at the loss of the very foundation of ideas of humanity, civilization, technology and progress on which the myth of Western superiority and civilizing mission are founded. In this sense, techne functions as a pharmakon, both poison and cure, since it diagnoses the cause of the disease affecting the colonial machinery as symptomatic of Western ideology.
Conrad’s sense of the hollowness of the colonial myth is best exemplified in images of insubstantial or reified bodies, whether of European officials or of the Africans subjected to their bloodthirsty rule. This new mode of visualizing the body, reduced to spectral figure or animated skeleton, reflects the impact of scientific innovation on the novella. The so-called new science, which included the groundbreaking discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen in December 1895, resulted in new ways of perceiving and representing the human body. Marlow’s descriptions of human beings as spectral presences and of the inner body as a dark, empty space in which only the bones are visible foreshadow Lacoue-Labarthe’s philosophical insight into the void of the modern subject. As Lisa Cartwright has argued, X-rays contributed to ‘the emergence of a distinctly modernist mode of representation in Western scientific and public culture’.14 In this sense, the X-ray vision is not only a scientific technology but also an artistic techne which can be read in Lacoue-Labarthian terms as an extension of the Greek problematic of art based on a mimesis which is not simply reproductive (art as a degraded copy of the real) but as the condition of a creative form of re-production (what Lacoue-Labarthe also calls ‘general mimesis’).15
In making the interior of the live body visible for the first time in history, the invention of the X-ray apparatus had a tremendous impact not only on medicine but also on Western culture as a whole. Not surprisingly, artists of all kinds pondered the implications of the new technology in their work: ‘From pulp fiction to the fine arts, writers, artists, and movie-makers played exuberantly with the idea of seeing through bodies with invisible rays, of looking for secrets beneath the surface’.16 Lacoue-Labarthe’s claim that the horror, and the horror of the technique de la mort, is something essential to the West is supported by the emergence of the new visual technology in European culture at the turn of the century, but also complicates it. Just as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy sought to identify the logic behind the ‘Nazi myth’ as a historically and ideologically grounded phenomenon as well as more abstract system that might reappear in another place, time and culture (as they state in the last paragraph), the horror underlying Western ‘civilization’ is both specific and representative.
The hollow body: Kurtz, Marlow and co.
Conrad’s striking ‘iconography of black and white’17 in Heart of Darkness has already been much commented on. We can nevertheless consider it anew by combining Lacoue-Labarthe’s association of techne with the horror of the West and the imagery of early X-rays in Marlow’s description of men lacking human presence and substance, thereby putting them outside the pale of humanity.18 Marlow’s descriptions of Africans as shadowy figures, vague shapes and insubstantial forms have been read as providing ample textual evidence of the dehumanizing rhetoric of racist discourse. But Marlow makes it clear that the ghostliness of Africans results from the brutality and violence of the colonial system. When he gets closer to the victims of exploitation, as in the scene of the chain gang, their bone structure becomes apparent. The narrator thus describes six African men through the marks of exploitation on their bodies, which makes their ‘ribs’ and ‘joints’ visible as in an X-ray picture: ‘I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope’ (64).
In the scene that follows, Marlow again expresses his horror as he witnesses the ravages of disease and starvation which have reduced men to ‘moribund shapes’ (66), ‘black bones’ (66) and ‘bundles of acute angles’ (67). Marlow contrasts the dehumanization of the African work force through overwork and starvation to the obscene hunger for ivory, money and power of the White traders and administrators. But whether consumed by their insatiable greed, or emptied of their living substance and left to die through hunger and hard labour, human beings across the racial divide are reduced to their skeletal structure. In the case of colonial officials, Marlow’s X-ray vision sees beyond appearances to gain access to the inner self, only to find out that the body is no more than a bag of bones surrounded with dark shadows, and disclose the horrific absence (or inscrutable darkness) of the heart. Instead of the rich, multi-layered thickness and many-coloured tissues disclosed by traditional anatomy, Marlow’s exploration of the human body reveals a baffling obscurity.
Conrad’s critique of the colonial system is most clearly articulated in the description of White traders and administrators who are compared to puppets, dummies and paper-cut illustrations. The most despicable colonial officials are ‘flabby’ (65) and boneless – that is, devoid of the ‘backbone’ possessed by Conrad’s more recognizably human characters. At the head of this fantastic procession of grotesque colonial types is Kurtz, whose distinction is suggested in part by his boniness. When Marlow meets Kurtz, he describes him as a strangely animated skeleton:
I saw the thin arm extended commandingly, the lower jaw moving, the eyes of that apparition shining darkly far in its bony head that nodded with grotesque jerks…I could see the cage of his ribs all astir, the bones of his arm waving. It was as though an animated image of death carved out of old ivory had been shaking its hand with menaces at a motionless crowd of men made of dark and glittering bronze. (134)
As in the images of the skeletal system provided by the X-ray machine, Kurtz’s body is shed of its flesh and blood materiality and reduced to a gesticulating assemblage of bones. Kurtz’s body has become consubstantial with his obsession – the acquisition of ivory. Part of the disturbing effect of the scene results from Kurtz’s embodiment of the idea of ‘death-in-life’ which was an essential aspect of the fascination over X-rays, shed of its soft tissues and organs, including the heart. Skeletons, which could only be seen after death before Röntgen’s invention, traditionally symbolized death. Visualizing them in live bodies complicated the significance of this age-old symbol, although X-ray images remained a powerful memento mori which enables Conrad to reactivate and renew the old danse macabre topos in his depiction of ‘the merry dance of death and trade’ (62). Read from a contemporary perspective, however, it also disquietingly anticipates the technique de la mort employed by the Nazis during the Holocaust, which Kurtz, who would have made a good leader for an extremist party as Marlow acutely observes, symbolizes. Rendering the body visible as pure materiality (bones) seems to gesture towards the possibility of treating human bodies as materials, or undifferentiated spectral presences that foreshadow their own disappearance. This is in a way what even Heidegger intimates when he associates the Holocaust with mechanical/technical forms of exploitation.19
As Lacoue-Labarthe observes, Marlow represents Kurtz as a chamber of echoes, a resounding skull which reveals his ‘hollow[ness] at the core’ (131). After their meeting, Kurtz remains a creature of words, a disembodied voice that keeps haunting him. Marlow himself is less substantial than he (or we) may think, hinting at a contamination that implicates the reader himself (or herself). Besides Marlow’s fascination for and resemblance to Kurtz, the storyteller is also a creature of words. Unravelling his enigmatic tale in the deepening obscurity, so that it ‘seemed to shape itself without human lips’ (83), Marlow and his companions are not unlike the sightless, whispering empty men of Eliot’s poem. The parallel between Kurtz and Marlow becomes especially relevant when the latter alloys the local manager’s nephew to believe that he has influence in Europe and is backed by those who promoted Kurtz. This implicit lie immediately transforms him into a flat and hollow character: ‘I became in an instant as much a pretence as the rest of the bewitched pilgrims’ (82). Although he has survived to tell the tale, Marlow bears the trace of his exposure to the ‘pestiferous absurdity’ (91) of Kurtz’s speech that affects his own fabulation, probably to enable us to have a ‘glimpse of what is at stake in the horror, that is, the savagery in us’ (120), to quote the last words of Lacoue-Labarthe’s essay.
Marlow describes the white traders and colonial administrators as boneless and hollow. In dramatic contrast with the ‘black shapes’ (66) of the dying Africans, the Company’s chief accountant is identified as a white man dressed in immaculate white. In Marlow’s ironic comment, ‘That’s backbone’ (68), is a recognition that the chief accountant’s fastidious taste for neat and elegant clothes does not express deeper moral or intellectual qualities: they merely help ‘keep up appearances’, since ‘starched collars and got-up shirt-fronts’ (68) provide structure, a false ‘backbone’ to a human body gone limp. Further on in his journey, Marlow meets the manager of the Middle Station, an unremarkable man whose status in the colonial hierarchy is said to result from his unique ability to resist the tropical climate. Marlow goes on to speculate that the only reason such a nobody holds a position of power in the colonial economy is that he has no human insides and is therefore not subject to illness, a speculation corroborated by the manager himself: ‘Once when various tropical diseases had laid low almost every “agent” in the station, he was heard to say, “Men who come out here should have no entrails”’ (74). Attempting to account for the manager’s success, Marlow speculates, ‘Perhaps there was nothing within him’ (74). Marlow’s efforts to read his enigmatic smile ‘opening into a darkness’ (74) end in bafflement, perhaps because there is, in fact, nothing to see. In Conrad’s novel, hollowness thus turns out to be a prerequisite to operate in the colonial system. The dandy accountant (the ‘hairdresser’s dummy’ [68]), the enduring manager (a literal no-body) and his scheming nephew (the ‘papier-maché Mephistopheles’ possibly filled with ‘loose dirt’ [81]) not only lack ‘guts’ and other bodily organs, but also a heart and symbolically human essence.
In the preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897), Conrad famously defined the gift of the artist as his unique capacity to ‘descend . . . within himself’, and his role as an appeal ‘to our less obvious capacities: to that part of our nature which . . . is necessarily kept out of sight’.20 For Conrad, ‘[a]ll art . . . appeals primarily to the senses’ and he notoriously declared: ‘My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see’.21 Conrad insists on the importance of recovering feeling over intellectual understanding. This, he goes on to argue, can be achieved especially through sight. He believes in the power of visible signs to gain access to a deeper understanding of reality and human nature, and of readable signs ‘to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions’.22 But a few years later, he was to reconsider the capacity of sight to provide insight into human nature, possibly as a result of his exposure to X-rays, which required a radical reconsideration of what vision itself meant, and of its limitations. Whereas a study of visible nature sought to confirm the idea of a created order designed for human understanding, Conrad’s novella is about the failure to achieve knowledge although, as Lacoue-Labarthe argues, it paradoxically brings a fundamental and deeply distressing insight into recent Western history and metaphysics. The new X-ray technology proclaimed to provide a new mode of access to the human body and new ways of seeing beneath the skin, but in Heart of Darkness it only discloses a horrifying absence of essence, possibly because there is nothing to see.The claim that X-ray technology makes visible the invisible is thus both dramatized and questioned in Heart of Darkness, which bears witness to a deep and lasting crisis of visibility in turn-of-the-century culture.
In Heart of Darkness, Conrad captures this anxiety by focusing on the enigmatic opacity of the body and redefines the potency of X-ray vision as the capacity to penetrate beneath the surface of the lie that constitutes the colonial myth. Röntgen’s invention thus provided Conrad with concrete images to express his disillusionment with the humanist notion of an essential, inner self, and capture what Coroneos has aptly called ‘heartless modernism’23 that hints at the fundamental inhumanity of Western techne that would reveal itself more fully in the course of the twentieth century. By questioning the claim that X-ray technology makes visible the invisible, Conrad states a position of epistemological, existential and even ontological doubt that draws attention to a deep and lasting crisis in European culture at the turn of the twentieth century – and beyond. Heart of Darkness can indeed be seen as recording the writer’s fascination for, but also alertness to, the dehumanizing effects of the technological turn and more generally for techne that is intimately bound up with the colonial enterprise through the fabrication of new myths. The novel thus foreshadows the dehumanizing effects that Lacoue-Labarthe identifies as the ultimate manifestation of Nazi ideology (in the mass technology of death). Conrad, Warrilow and Lacoue-Labarthe, however, suggest that we cannot do away with the reality of material bodies through which the question of the human must be constantly reopened.
This essay is dedicated to Alexis. An earlier version of this article, titled ‘Body Politics: Conrad’s Anatomy of Empire in Heart of Darkness’, was first published in Conradiana in 2004. The present article elaborates on several points of contact between my reading of Conrad’s novella and Lacoue-Labarthe’s critique of techne. I am much indebted to Nidesh Lawtoo for the stimulating and friendly exchanges out of which the revised piece grew.
1 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Phrase (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2000), 87–8.
2 Jacques Derrida, ‘Introduction: Desistance’, in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed.Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 7.
3 Lacoue-Labarthe’s discussion on techne is tied to both the aesthetic question of mimetic art and the political question of the Holocaust. In addition to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Nazi Myth’, trans. Brian Holmes, Critical Inquiry 16 (1990): 291–312, the key text on this question is probably La ficiton du politique: Heidegger, l’art, et la politique (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1987). See especially 51–63 where these issues are clearly articulated.
4 Derrida, ‘Desistance’, 6.
5 Lacoue-Labarthe also refers to Conrad’s novel as a fable and a muthos, but he refuses to see it as an allegory (120), probably in order to distinguish it from Nazi ideology as a total and totalizing myth based on ‘the logic of an idea’ and therefore functioning in the ‘allegorical mode’ as he argues in ‘The Nazi Myth’, 293; 302.
6 Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, ‘Heart of Darkness as a Modernist Anti-Fairytale’,The Conradian 33.2 (2008): 1–17.
7 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, ‘The Nazi Myth’, 293.
8 Derrida, ‘Desistance’.
9 Derrida, ‘Desistance’, 6.
10 On the question of mimesis, see Nidesh Lawtoo’s two contributions to this volume.
11 The first major study examining the significance of the gendered land-as-body metaphor in the colonial context was Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). Subsequent studies of novelistic constructions of Africa as female include David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press, 1993); Florence Stratton, Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender (London & New York: Routledge, 1994); Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose, Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies (New York & London: Guilford Press, 1994.); and Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London & New York: Routledge, 1995).
12 Chinua Achebe’s influential essay indicting Conrad for racism, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Heart of Darkness’, in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul B. Armstrong (New York: Norton, 2006) 336–49, initiated a whole subgenre of Conrad criticism reappraising the political implications of Heart of Darkness. See Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1988) and Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers (London & Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983) for a nuanced position on this question.
13 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York & London: Routledge, 1993), 53.
14 Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), xi.
15 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe,L’imitation des modernes: Typographies 2 (Paris: Galilée, 1986).
16 Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles, Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the Twentieth Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 4. Among the writers who incorporated imagery derived from the new technology in their work were Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and H. G. Wells. See Holtzmann Kelves, Naked to the Bone and Michael H. Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
17 Parry, Conrad and Imperialism, 5.
18 Lacoue-Labarthe’s insistence on hollowness, emptiness of meaning, solitude, disaffection and anguish (‘Moi, la mort dans l’âme’ 84) as characteristic of the modern condition in his account of Heart of Darkness signals that he is probably reading Conrad’s tale through Eliot’s poem, as the echoes to ‘Four Quartets’ in ‘Phrase XIV’, a poem dedicated to ‘Jean-Luc [Nancy]’, suggests (Phrase, 84–7).
19 Lacoue-Labarthe, La fiction du politique, 58.
20 Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (New York: Doubleday, 1924), xii.
21 Conrad, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, xiv.
22 Conrad, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, xiii.
23 Con Coroneos, Space, Conrad, and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 39.