The horror of mimesis: Echoing Lacoue-Labarthe1
NIDESH LAWTOO
There is a philosophical urgency that is no longer possible to avoid: we are being compelled to think, or to rethink, mimesis.
PHILIPPE LACOUE-LABARTHE, L’imitation des modernes.
During his career, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has thought and rethought the question of mimesis, and this type of thinking equally informs his affective reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Although Lacoue-Labarthe does not state it loudly, one of the main ambitions of ‘The Horror of the West’ is to open up a mimetic line of inquiry in Conrad studies. His reading of Kurtz as an artistic qua ‘mythic’ (115) figure characterized by the ‘absence of any proper being’ [absence de tout être-propre]’ (116) and by the ‘will to power’ (117) to take control of the modern masses has a familiar ring to readers acquainted with Lacoue-Labarthe’s philosophical work.2 This reading is directly in-formed (i.e. given form) by the fundamental ‘mimetology’ the French philosopher never tried to trace, moving – with a tempo and rhythm characteristic of a ‘long distance run’, says Jacques Derrida3 – from the origins of Western philosophical thought to the horrors of the Holocaust. That Conrad was in a position to foresee not only the ethical and political horrors of fascist will to power but also the affective and conceptual mimetic presuppositions responsible for ‘the horror of the West’, is one of the reasons Lacoue-Labarthe enthusiastically celebrates Heart of Darkness as ‘an event of thought’ (112).
In this chapter, I would like to follow-up on some of the mimetic implications of Lacoue-Labarthe’s breathtaking reading in order to continue to bear witness to the untimeliness of Heart of Darkness for our contemporary times. Taking my clue from the French philosopher’s insight into the hollow core of modern subjectivity, I trace the aesthetic, psychic and political manifestations of different types of mimetic moves, tropes and figures that animate the novella as a whole. Relying on Lacoue-Labarthe’s foundational work on mimesis as well as on more recent developments in mimetic theory,4 I argue that Conrad’s fascination with the ‘homo duplex’ is but one instance of his more general engagement with what I shall call affective mimesis. That is, a behavioural form of imitation whose primary characteristic consists in generating a psychological confusion between self and other(s) which, in turn, deprives subjects of their full rational presence to selfhood or, to use Lacoue-Labarthe’s language, of their ‘proper being’ tout court. At work in Conrad’s novella is, quite literally, an ‘outbreak’ of mimetic phenomena: somnambulism, compassion, hypnosis, depersonalization, suggestion, contagion and enthusiasm are all mimetic tendencies that haunt the Conradian conception of the subject. As we shall see, both the form and the content of Conrad’s tale reflect the process of ideological formation of the subject in childhood, its persistent psychic malleability in adulthood, as well as the ethical and political horrors that continue to ensue when the modern masses capitulate to the power of mass media. Echoing Lacoue-Labarthe, I shall call this type of horror, the horror of mimesis.5
The mimetic frame
. . . if you allow me to use Plato’s categories . . .
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘The Horror of the West’
Conrad’s choice to filter Marlow’s narrative by an anonymous frame narrator situates his ‘tale’ at a twice, or even three-times removed distance from Kurtz’s ‘original’ insight into ‘the horror’. The listeners on the Nellie listening to one of Marlow’s ‘inconclusive experiences’ (51) in the dark, never see Kurtz’s shady figure, nor do they hear the emotional pathos of his ‘deep voice’ (134). Rather, they are merely exposed to Marlow’s mimetic reproduction of Kurtz’s words. What they hear in Marlow’s voice is thus but an echo of a voice which is, in turn, mediated by yet another frame narrator for us to read. The experience of mimesis comes, thus, quite literally first, in the sense that it is only through a series of narrative representations, mediations and echoes that Kurtz’s original insight into ‘the horror’ can be approached.
This is, in a sense, also Lacoue-Labarthe’s starting point. Thinking of David Warrilow’s dramatic impersonation, Lacoue-Labarthe begins to account for the ‘narrative complexity’ of Heart of Darkness along the following lines:
We are therefore confronted, it would seem, with what one might describe, following Plato’s canonical terminology, as a ‘mimetic’ device [dispositif ‘mimétique’], something almost ‘theatrical’—and here I am thinking both of Jouanneau’s stage production and of Warrilow’s performance. The enunciator delegates his enunciation to someone else; the author does not speak in his own name but ‘invents a fable’ [‘fabulise’].6 (112)
As Plato famously explains in Book 3 of the Republic, in the context of a discussion that has the theatre as its paradigmatic model, in mimetic diction (or lexis) the speaker does not speak in his proper name (say, Homer speaking as Homer, or Conrad as Conrad) but, rather, he delegates his speech to someone else (say, Homer inventing Akhilleus, or Conrad inventing Marlow). A narrative doubling is thus created which, as Socrates puts it, allows the enunciator ‘to deliver a speech as if he were someone else’ (my emphasis)7 (say Homer or, better, a rhapsode reciting Homer on the theatrical stage, speaking as if he were Akhilleus; Conrad, or better, Warrilow reciting Conrad on the theatrical stage, speaking as if he were Marlow).
How does this mimetic doubling take place? How can the self magically slip under the skin of the other ‘likening [him]self in speech and bodily bearing’ as Plato says, himself speaking as if he were Socrates?8 By a simple, yet effective narrative device: in mimetic speech (tragedy, comedy, Platonic dialogues), the enunciator does not use a third person (indirect) narrative to talk about his characters (‘he or she’) but a first person (direct) speech which allows the speaker to impersonate his characters (‘I’). This mimetic doubling does not only entail a narrative reproduction of reality but it also allows for an affective impersonation with a fictional character to take place: the speaker who adopts the speech of the other is placed in a position to feel, at least in part, the affect of the other, to partake in an experience that remains exterior, to be sure, but that the dramatic impersonation also renders interior. The rhapsode on the stage weeps or rails as Akhilleus does in order to communicate his pain or anger to the audience who, in turn, feels some of this pain too; Warrilow cries out at the wilderness like Kurtz in order to communicate something of ‘the horror’, and this emotion is felt by Lacoue-Labarthe too. Indeed, Lacoue-Labarthe, like Plato before him, is fundamentally aware that a mimetic manner of speech (or mimetic lexis) – and the mimetic identifications that ensue (or mimetic impersonation) – is endowed with a power of communication that affects the audience in the theatre and, by extension, spreads across the entire body politic (or mimetic contagion).
And yet, Lacoue-Labarthe is also aware that the text of Heart of Darkness does not confront readers with a direct, affective experience. Thus, he immediately qualifies the status of these mimetic duplications by focusing on the different manners of diction (or lexis) that inform the content (or logos) of the tale (or muthos).9 Referring again to Plato’s narratological categories, he continues to frame Conrad’s text thus:
And yet, it is not so simple. . . This ‘novel’ [‘roman’] is not a narrative [récit], nor is it simply a narrative of a narrative [le récit d’un récit]. It is composed, if you allow me to use Plato’s categories (in reality, they are the only ones we have) of a diegesis—a minimal diegesis, held together by the ‘we’ of the first three pages and by the rare instances of the ‘I’. . .—taken over, in a mimetic mode, by a new diegesis which is itself interrupted by mimetic passages. (112–13)
Lacoue-Labarthe admits that to fully account for the formal complexity of the narrative, ‘a far more meticulous analysis’ should be pursued (113). In order to further this line of inquiry, let us notice that within this complex narratological/theatrical ‘dispositif’, Marlow occupies a central affective and formal position. Affective because he is tied to both his listeners and to Kurtz: ‘the bond of the sea’ (45) ties him to his listeners, ‘intimacy’ (143) to Kurtz. Formal because Marlow functions as the locus of connection where diegetic and mimetic speech meet and intercalate: Marlow, the narrator, talks about the characters he encounters by using the third person narrative form (diegesis), but since Marlow is also the protagonist of his narrative, he talks about them in the characteristic form of the propria persona (mimesis). Mimesis is thus integral part of the medium of Marlow’s message – perhaps because this medium is the message Conrad is attempting to convey.
Mimetic sexism and colonial ideology
What is threatening in mimesis is feminization, instability—hysteria.
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘Typography’
Mimetic, identificatory affects are central to the telling of Conrad’s tale and must be understood in relation to the gender divide Marlow initially sets up. From the beginning, Marlow puts his rhetoric to work in order to reinforce what Henry Staten in his contribution to this volume, calls the ‘manly group identification. . . to his listeners’ (205). These affective, identificatory bonds are generated by Marlow’s mimetic speech, but even at the level of his diegetic speech, mimesis remains central. In fact, Marlow begins by representing women as emotional, mimetic creatures who are radically opposed to his male rational listeners. We are thus told, in a detached diegetic narrative, that Marlow encounters a ‘compassionate secretary. . . full of desolation and sympathy’ (56) ‘with an air of taking an immense part in all [his] sorrows’ (57). Compassion is a mimetic affect whereby one suffers with the other, perhaps even suffers as the other does which, in the context of Belgian colonialism, is a contradiction in terms. But compassion is not the only mimetic affect Marlow ironically invokes in order to distance his ‘masculine’ position from femininity. Invoking the language of psychopathology, he compares the other secretary’s behaviour to a ‘somnambulist’ (55). A mimetic pathology much discussed in the last decades of the nineteenth century,10 somnambulism suggests a passive, entranced disposition whereby the subject simply reproduces the orders of the dominant ideology. Both somnambulism and compassion, then, are mimetic affects in the sense that they create a psychic confusion between self and other which, in turn, dispossesses these female characters of their rational capacity to act as subjects.
Marlow’s ironic, diegetic distance with respect to women continues if we turn to the third case of mimetic femininity that immediately follows: that is, the enthusiastic woman. Speaking of that ‘dear enthusiastic soul’ (53) who is his aunt, Marlow makes this sweeping comment about her colonial fervour:
There had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just about that time, and the excellent woman living right in the rush of all that humbug got carried off her feet. She talked about ‘weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways’ (59).
Notice that Marlow’s critique does not simply concern the newspapers’ ideological content but, rather, the affective impact of this medium on the psychic life of readers – in this case, feminine readers. Informed by a fin-de-siècle awareness of crowd psychology,11 Conrad implies, via Marlow, that blind beliefs in civilizing missions expressed in print affect, like a virus, the psychic lives of the public. Hence, for Marlow, the aunt’s thoughts are, quite literally, not her own; another speaks through her, namely, the idol of colonial ideology. The aunt is thus ‘enthusiastic’ in the Platonic sense of the term (from Greek entousiazein, to be possessed by a god): she is merely a passive medium for the message of the other 12
Feminist critics have rightly denounced the sexist implications of Conrad’s representations of women, but it is important to realize that sexism is not the only issue here. At stake in Marlow’s attitude towards women is a tacit, yet fundamental, difficulty in taking hold of a mimetic conception of the subject insofar as mimesis is not only disavowed but also projected onto gendered others. Thus, if we sum up Marlow’s diegetic account of women, the following crude mimetic evaluation ensues: for Marlow, women are somnambulistic-compassionate-enthusiastic creatures; as such, they are inevitably predisposed to get carried off their feet by all kinds of ideological ‘rot’ that appears in print, while men’s feet and minds continue to diligently trade the path of ‘facts’ and ‘truth’. Marlow’s sexism, in short, should be qualified as mimetic sexism.
And yet, despite the initial diegetic distance Marlow posits between women and men, the narrative shows that such a distance is not as absolute as it appears to be. Marlow’s colonial adventure is, in fact, rooted in a passive, mimetic disposition that far exceeds his mimetic representation of women. Here is a thorough explanation of the psychic origins of his colonial adventure expressed now in direct mimetic speech:
Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. . . I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there. . . [T]here was in it one river especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land. And as I looked at the map of it in a shop-window, it fascinated me as a snake would a bird—a silly little bird. . . [I] could not shake off the idea. The snake had charmed me. (52–3)
Marlow’s childish passion for the colonial instrument par excellence is predicated on an emotional fascination that totally deprives him of his critical presence to selfhood. The tropes of the ‘snake’ and the ‘silly little bird’ perfectly capture the state of entranced, psychic passivity characteristic of the mimetic subject. Marlow is quite literally hypnotized and deprived of mastery over his feet and thoughts. A capitulation to the formative power of mimesis – what Lacoue-Labarthe calls ‘typography’ – has thus taken place as Marlow was a ‘young and tender’ creature, a mimetic creature who, as Plato also recognized is ‘best molded and takes the impression that one wishes to stamp upon it’.13
In time, Marlow the ‘little chap’ turns into a self-reliant ‘seaman’ and ‘wanderer’ (48), but both the map’s hypnotic power and Marlow’s mimetic suggestibility remain essentially the same. In fact, the suggestive tropes of the ‘snake’ and the ‘charmed’ ‘bird’ apply to Marlow the adult ‘wanderer’, walking along Fleet street – the former home of the British press14 – not to the ‘little chap’. It is, thus, no accident that precisely as he glances at the map, Marlow ‘remember[s] there was a big concern, a Company for trade on that river’ (52) and feels compelled to enact the colonial ‘dream’ he first experienced as a child to ‘go there’.
At work in this passage is a critical genealogy that traces the colonizer’s subjection to power back to mimetic childhood. The emotion of thought at work in this passage exposes the limits of humanist notions of free-will and rationality and confirms the subject’s passive-malleable-hypnotic – that is, mimetic – status. The radicalism of Conrad’s tacit critique of the subject of ideology stems from a dual realization. First, that a hypnotic state of mimetic dispossession characterizes the dominant subject and, thus, that mimesis cannot easily be displaced on the side of femininity alone. And second, that this psychic state is far from being something extraordinary. As the ‘case of Marlow’ suggests, it is instead such an ordinary everyday experience which can be triggered by any ideologically charged commodity – a map and the press in the old days, video games, the web and other mimetic devices in our post-modern times. Briefly put, Conrad begins to show us that the male subject of ideology is not the subject of Aufklärung (alias the rational man) but the subject of mimesis (alias the ‘silly little bird’).
By furthering the line of inquiry opened up by Lacoue-Labarthe, we are now in a position to see that Marlow’s formal oscillation between mimetic and diegetic speech (lexis) also reveals an oscillation in the mimetic content (logos) of his tale. And what we see is that the affective mimesis he forecloses is inevitably constitutive of his own psychic life. What we must add now is that if Marlow’s take on femininity cannot be dissociated from his take on mimesis, the same can be said with respect to his equally problematic take on race.
The racist pathos of mimetic rhetoric
Nothing, in effect, resembles more mimesis than enthusiasm.
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, L’imitation des modernes
Marlow’s understanding of racial difference is predicated on a violent hierarchy that is reminiscent of his earlier considerations on gender. The link is all the more clear since Marlow introduces a distinction between subjects who are in possession of themselves (White men) and subjects who are not (‘prehistoric men’). And, once again, the notion of ‘enthusiasm’ pops up in a notorious passage in order to mark a difference between mimetic and non-mimetic subjects:
[A] burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. . . we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. (96; my italics)
As it was already the case with Marlow’s ‘enthusiastic’ aunt, the Africans’ ‘enthusiastic outbreak’ deprives racial subjects of rational control over themselves. Yet, the mimetic degree of these subjects acquires a bodily, collective dimension that was lacking in the somnambulistic-compassionate-enthusiastic Belgian women. Moreover, Conrad’s detailed physical description of this primal, mimetic scene suggests that he has in mind a ritual dance endowed with the affective power to induce a state of psychic (dis)possession.15 Such a state of ‘frenzy’, as he calls it is well known, in both ancient and modern times: Plato calls it ‘enthusiasm’; Nietzsche calls it ‘Dionysian’; Girard calls it mimetic ‘crisis’; Lacoue-Labarthe, thinking along Greek/Nietzschean lines, calls it ‘chorus’ (114).
At this stage, Marlow’s account of race is based on the naïve, ethnocentric idea that the mimetic subject is always ‘the other’, and Lacoue-Labarthe, long-distance runner that he is, does not slow down to account for this ideological hurdle. At this stage, both literary and philosophical accounts of the ‘myth’ of the other seem to reinforce the violent hierarchy between nature and culture, ‘savagery’ and ‘civilization’ that famously infuriated Chinua Achebe.16 I say ‘seem’ because while contemptuously dismissing this Dionysian chorus as a hysterical pathology, Marlow’s narrative also oscillates in the opposite direction:
Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of the first ages—could comprehend. (96)
Marlow’s narrative voice oscillates madly, back and forth, between racist injunctions that dehumanize racial others and repeated attempts to nuance such racist distinctions. His statements are, indeed, paradoxical: he seems intent in conveying both a critical distance and an affective proximity to racial others. ‘Racism’, as Achebe recognized, is clearly part of his rhetoric, but so are his persistent attempts to establish a connection between his White listeners and the Africans dancers, ‘rational/sane’ subjects and ‘enthusiastic/mad’ subjects.
Rather than quarrelling about the racist or anti-racist implications of these lines, I suggest we slow down and ask ourselves a more fundamental question: namely, what is the emotional and conceptual logic that motivates such paradoxical rhetorical oscillations towards/away from enthusiastic others?
Notice that this passage is not only about racism; it is also about mimesis. And at this stage in the narrative, Marlow not only uncritically displaces the mimetic conception of the subject on to subordinate others but also begins to acknowledge that mimetic responses are constitutive of the modern subject. For this reason, Marlow now claims that a ‘kinship’ exists between his listeners and the ‘wild and passionate’ ‘uproar’ the Africans give voice to. And for the same reason he insists that at work in such an ‘enthusiastic outbreak’ is a ‘meaning’ that the modern, ‘civilized’ subject can still ‘comprehend’. But this apparently linear project to bring mimesis back home, on the side of ‘modernity’ and ‘civilization’, entangles Marlow’s narrative in a paradoxical rhetorical situation. In fact, he attempts to convey the mimetic status of the subject to his ‘civil’, Victorian listeners, through the example of the ‘prehistoric’ enthusiastic Africans he seems to repudiate on racist grounds. A contradictory push-pull between racist and mimetic imperatives is thus at work in the narrative structure of this complex passage: if a racist conception of the subject introduces a rational distance, such a distance is nonetheless immediately challenged by the mimetic chorus that emotionally affects Marlow. In short, if half of the story is about racism, the other half is about mimesis, and Marlow’s dialectical narrative trajectory (i.e. affirmations of racial distance followed by a dialectical ‘but’ which immediately negates distance and affirms a common mimesis) indicates that the emphasis is perhaps less on a disjunctive racial distance than on a conjunctive mimetic pathos. So much at the level of content (logos) of this mythic narrative; but what about the formal, narrative strategies (lexis) that inform Marlow’s rhetorical moves?
Marlow’s attempt to acknowledge the mimetic status of the modern subject through the example of the ‘enthusiastic’ Africans in a state of ‘frenzy’ threatens to disrupt the identificatory connection with his (racist) listeners. Within this impossible narrative situation, Marlow’s offensive characterization of the Africans occupies a paradoxical (or hyperbological) rhetorical function. We have seen that racist injunctions, such as ‘the worst of it’, or ‘ugly’, are obviously instrumental in introducing a distance between the dominant and the subordinate; the subject of Aufklärung and the subject of mimesis. Less obvious, however, is that such a racist distance is precisely what his listeners expect to hear. If we reread this passage by paying careful attention to the rhetorical dimension informing the narrative as a whole, it is not even sure that these racist judgements originate directly from Marlow’s voice. We should in fact not forget that Marlow’s diegesis is interrupted by ‘mimetic passages’ whereby the listeners voice their discontent. Such mimetic interactions usually take place at moments of maximum tension between the Marlow’s tale and his listeners’ ‘civil’ expectations. And at such moments, Marlow tends to repeat, with indignation, the listeners’ intrusive ejaculations, ejaculations we readers do not always get to hear directly. Here are a few examples: ‘Yes; I looked at them as you would any human being, with a curiosity of their impulses, . . . when brought to the test of an inexorable physical necessity. Restraint! What possible restraint?’ (105). Or, ‘[a man] must meet that truth with his own true stuff—with his own inborn strength. Principles? Principles won’t do’.17 And again: ‘Who’s that grunting? You wonder I didn’t go ashore for a howl and a dance? Well, no—I didn’t. Fine sentiments, you say? Fine sentiments, be hanged!’ (97). Marlow’s rhetorical pattern indicates that words like ‘restraint’, ‘principles’, ‘fine sentiments’ are, indeed, originally not his own; he simply restates, for rhetorical effect, what a listener has been saying. With this crucial formal point in mind the following passages resonate quite differently: ‘[the earth] was unearthly and the men were. . . No they were not inhuman’. Or, ‘the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough, but. . .’. The rhetorical movements at work in Marlow’s mimetic voice suggests that racist injunctions like the unvoiced ‘inhuman’ and the voiced ‘ugly’ might have their origin in his listeners and that Marlow ventriloquizes them for rhetorical reasons – and for us to hear.
Perhaps, then, Marlow’s racist narrative moves, while not excusable, have a specific rhetorical function: they serve to reassure his audience that he is still one of them after all and thus are instrumental in maintaining the mimetic ties with his listeners and readers. Marlow is now relying on this mimetic bond at the level of lexis (the medium), in order to paradoxically bring home the mimetic affects the Africans embody at the level of logos (the message). And yet, in order to do this, Marlow must, at the same time, constantly nuance his racist injunctions; if racial ‘otherness’ is exaggerated, mimetic ‘sameness’ cannot be conveyed. In other words, racism here functions both as a (mimetic) rhetorical strategy and, at the same time, as an impediment to the communication of the (mimetic) content of Marlow’s tale. Structurally speaking, this passage is predicated on a double-bind that swings Marlow’s narrative voice back and forth between contradictory poles. And it is precisely through this maddening oscillation that the narrator desperately attempts to make his sceptical listeners recognize and acknowledge their affective vulnerability to such enthusiastic, mimetic outbreaks. We are thus beginning to see that this narrative is predicated on a communication of mimesis through mimesis, where mimesis is both the content and the medium of the message.18
The heated controversy concerning racism and sexism in Heart of Darkness is indeed heavily inflected by the less visible but more fundamental – in the sense that it informs both racism and sexism – problematic of mimesis. For Marlow it is, in fact, crucial to acknowledge that the modern rational subject of Aufklärung continues to remain in a zone of dangerous proximity to contagious, mimetic affects initially projected onto subordinate ‘others’. But why? Why is it so terribly important that his modern listeners acknowledge that they too are still vulnerable to states of mimetic dispossession? Paul Armstrong’s Norton Critical edition of Heart of Darkness gives us access to a manuscript passage that Conrad did not include in the final version of the text but helps us answer what I take to be the fundamental question at the heart of this mythic text. In the context of Marlow’s discussion about the effect of the enthusiastic frenzy in Africa, we read the following report about Europe:
You know how it is when we hear the band of a regiment. A martial noise—and you pacific father, mild guardian of a domestic hearth-stone suddenly find yourself thinking of carnage. The joy of killing—hey?19
Now we can better hear the type of ‘noise’ Marlow has in mind when he encourages his listeners to acknowledge their mimetic ‘response’ to the ‘frankness’ of the ‘African’ drums. For him, the ‘enthusiastic’ effect of the chorus in the jungle is not any different from a modern response to the musical rhythm generated by a ‘martial noise’ at the heart of Europe. This is, indeed, a mimetic repetition with a vengeance: the ethico-political difference being that unlike the African dance, ‘modern’ ritual responses to contagious music have the power to generate the ‘joy of killing’ in otherwise ‘pacific fathers’. We can now better understand why Marlow/Conrad is struggling to make his listeners/readers realize that mimetic forms of dispossession should not be hastily displaced onto subordinate others. It is because for Conrad/Marlow, disquieting forms of mimetic reactions are haunting the European body politic that it is essential for Western subjects to emotionally acknowledge and think through, their own vulnerability to the contagious power of affective mimesis.
The barbarity of mimesis
The recoil from the horror is Western barbarity itself.
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘The Horror of the West’
As Marlow and his men follow the meandering course of that hypnotic snake which is the river Congo, the presence of mimetic affects that haunt Heart of Darkness progressively intensifies. As the narrative unfolds, enthusiastic affects not only appear in relation to gendered subjects (Part I), nor do they exclusively qualify racial subjects (Part II) but also appear to characterize, with increasing insistence, that ‘troupe of mimes’ (126) who are the White male colonial figures (Part III). A mimetic conception of the subject and all it entails – that is, suggestibility to suggestion, hypnotic (dis)possession, psychic depersonalization, emotional contagion etc. – characterizes the mimetic figures whose ‘absence of any proper-being’ (116), as Lacoue-Labarthe puts it, haunt not only the heart of darkness, but the West as a whole.
Take the Harlequin, for instance, a figure Lacoue-Labarthe does not slow down to analyse but remains central to understand the type of mimetic ‘void’ the French philosopher denounces as constitutive of the ‘myth of the West’ (112). This figure embodies the most extreme version of the subject’s suggestibility, enthusiasm and mimetic depersonalization Marlow has encountered so far. The narrator first introduces him as a subject totally devoid of individuality in familiar mimetic terms: he says that had ‘absconded from a troupe of mimes, enthusiastic, fabulous’ (126). And then he adds that he lacked ‘all thought of self’ and that ‘even when he was talking to you, you forgot that it was he—the man before your eyes—who had gone through these things’ (127). The Harlequin, in other words, is a mimetic nobody who can assume the psychic form of everybody, a ‘man without proper qualities’ (115–116) as Lacoue-Labarthe says of Kurtz. And indeed, the Harlequin’s enthusiasm is primarily for that ‘phantom’ who is Mr Kurtz. We are told that ‘[t]he man filled his life, occupied his thoughts, swayed his emotions’ (128). This mimetic man is not simply under the influence of another subject; he is, quite literally, possessed by that ‘phantom’ in such a fundamental way that the distinction between self and other, copy and original, no longer holds. This figure is but the shadow of another shady figure; his voice but an echo of another, haunting voice.
Who, then, is Mr Kurtz? And wherein lies his power of fascination? Lacoue-Labarthe stresses the fact that the ‘essence’ of Kurtz’s being is not located in his actions, nor in his mind, but in his ‘voice’ (114). Relying on his account of ‘general mimesis’ developed in L’imitation des modernes, he defines Kurtz as a hollow man who ‘having no property in himself. . . is capable of appropriating them all for himself’ (115). For the French philosopher this ‘absence of any proper-being’, which he identifies in the figure of Kurtz qua artist, defines not only ‘the genius’ in the Modern tradition20 but is also responsible for what he calls a manipulation of a ‘technique de la mort’ responsible for devastating forms of Western ‘will to power’ (117). Reading Conrad in a way informed by his previous work on Plato and Aristotle, and also Diderot, Nietzsche and Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe proclaims, in an apocalyptic mood, that what is at stake in Heart of Darkness is nothing less and nothing more than ‘the entire destiny of the West’ (113). Now, it is true that in order to accept Lacoue-Labarthe’s fundamental claim about ‘the horror of the West’, one needs to share a vertiginous number of philosophical assumptions (about mimesis, poiesis, muthos, techne, will to power, etc.), assumptions he develops in his protean oeuvre, and that resonate through his reading of Conrad. But it is equally true that if we continue patiently to follow, at a rhythm and tempo that is ours, the mimetic undercurrent that runs through the entire texture of Heart of Darkness, there is perhaps a sense in which we might finally catch up with Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading of the horror.
For instance, we could notice that Kurtz’s power over the masses does not rely exclusively on the supposed naivety and mimeticism of racial and gendered subjects: that is, the mimetic sexism and racism Lacoue-Labarthe deftly jumped over and slowed us down above. The mimetic Harlequin is, of course, part of the ‘troupe of mimes’ impressed by the typographic (will to) power of Kurtz’s voice. But even Conrad’s self-reliant hero is not immune to Kurtz’s ‘magnificent eloquence’. Thus, Marlow feels entitled to say that
[O]f all his gifts the one that stood out preëminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words—the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness. (113–14)
The heart of darkness and the darkness of mimesis are, once again, tightly strung together. And, once again, Marlow’s evaluation oscillates between opposite poles. With one of his narrative voices, he openly condemns the mimetic suggestion at work in Kurtz’s ‘gift of expression’ in terms of a ‘deceitful flow’. But another voice enthusiastically celebrates it as ‘illuminating’ ‘pulsating stream of light’. Similarly, speaking of Kurtz’s ‘report’, he ironically notes that it was ‘too high-strung’ (118), and as he retrospectively meditates on this report, in diegetic speech, Marlow the narrator can indeed maintain an ironic distance from Kurtz’s rhetorical pathos. Yet, as Marlow the character first reads the ‘pamphlet’, his critical distance seems to vacillate: recognizing that ‘it was a beautiful piece of writing’, ‘eloquent, vibrating with eloquence’ (117), he confesses his capitulation to Kurtz’s ‘magic current of phrases’ (118), in mimetic speech: ‘From that point he soared and took me with him. . . It made me tingle with enthusiasm’ (118; my italics).
Now, why does Marlow enthusiastically accept an ideological position that he had earlier denounced as non-meditated ‘devotion’ (Harlequin), or ‘sentimental pretence’ (women)? The mimetic logic of the text we are trying to make audible indicates that the modern subject, whether in Africa or in Europe, is equally vulnerable by the ‘unbounded power of eloquence—of words—of burning noble words’ (118). In fact, Conrad insistently shows that while Marlow consciously struggles to distance himself from such a state of dispossession, he nonetheless repeatedly avows his proximity and vulnerability to enthusiastic, mimetic affects.
At stake in Marlow’s narrative is thus not only a personal avowal of his own suggestibility to Kurtz’s rhetorical (will to) power but also a realization of its political impact on the dominant body politic. Heart of Darkness makes clear that mimetic affects are indifferent to human, all too human, racial, gendered and cultural categorizations. Once back in Belgium, a journalist tells Marlow: ‘[H]eavens! How that man could talk. He electrified large meetings. . . He would have been a splendid leader of an extreme party’ (154). The leader figure may move around the world, but his mimetic will to power as well as the predisposition of crowds to be mesmerized by it remains fundamentally the same. Whether ‘the magic current of phrases’ appears in ‘print’, ‘talk’, ‘pamphlets’, speeches in the jungle or ‘at large meetings’ in Europe, it has the power to ‘electrify’ subjects, dispossessing them of rational control over themselves. It should be clear by now that the power of darkness and the horrors that ensue cannot be dissociated from the ongoing threat of mimetic depersonalization. The phantom that haunts the heart of darkness is the phantom of imitation; the horror, for Conrad, is the horror of mimesis.
History, unfortunately, will prove Conrad’s insights into the horrific results of mimetic behaviour prophetic. As Lacoue-Labarthe says allusively but unequivocally, ‘we know what followed’ (117): in the Europe of the 1910s, not to speak of the 1930s and 1940s, mass media, martial parades and electrifying speeches will soon stimulate the ‘joy of killing’ in usually ‘pacific fathers’. In this sense, Heart of Darkness is prophetic of horrors yet to come; it diagnoses in advance the totalitarian power of tyrannical leader figures and the mimetic pathologies they promote. And yet, it also seems, that despite his apparent genial nature, the tyrannical leader figure (who, by the way, ‘had been writing for the papers’ [148]), like his mimetic follower, is but a hollow figure who does not possess political ideas to call his own. As Marlow asks, ‘[w]hat party’ Kurtz could preside over, the visitor answers: ‘Any party. . . . [h]e was an—an—extremist’ (154).
This is the moment to interrogate what is perhaps the fundamental presupposition of Lacoue-Labarthe’s argument in ‘The Horror of the West’. I wonder: are leader figures who rely on the power of voice and techne to impress the mimetic crowd really in line with a productive form of ‘general mimesis’ characteristic of Romantic artists and universal geniuses? Or, alternatively, could it be that these ‘hollow’ figures or, as Marlow ironically says, these ‘poor chap[s]’, are passively in-formed by the power of mimetic media that mechanically reproduce opinions for them to repeat? What if so-called political types à la Kurtz (each country has their own) are typographically churned out by crude forms of ‘restricted mimesis’ that lead them to enthusiastically echo, in the most passive and uncritical way, the louder message in the dominant medium? What our race in the stimulating company of Lacoue-Labarthe – from Fleet Street to Kurtz’s journalistic pamphlets – suggests is that the second option is the correct one: that is, that the horror in Heart of Darkness and, perhaps ‘the horror of the West’ too, is the horror generated by passive and rather shallow forms of mimetic capitulations to the reproductive power of mass media. We find a confirmation of this mimetic hypothesis in a little quoted, apparently superficial passage that prepares Kurtz’s final, much-quoted, and supposedly deeper insight into the heart of darkness. With Marlow, we are left to wonder about the obscure origins of Kurtz’s powerful voice as he hears it one last time, right before the end is approaching: ‘Was he rehearsing some speech in his sleep, or was it a fragment of a phrase of newspaper article?’ (148). That this question is asked at all indicates that Kurtz’s voice may be less original than it initially sounded and that he is but an echo of ‘other voices’: ‘this voices—other voices—all of them were so little more than voices’ (115). This ‘echo’ does not re-produce any creative force, but mechanically re-produces a readymade mimetic message which, if expressed through the right mimetic medium, has the power to induce the joy of killing in pacific fathers. Perhaps, then, if Heart of Darkness constitutes an ‘event of thought’, it is also because it is a reminder of the power of mass media to shape mass opinion in our contemporary, hyper-mimetic times.
Finally, as a last tentative step ‘I’ could add, with Hillis Miller, that ‘we’ should be careful in locating the true origin of mimetic horrors exclusively ‘in the West’. We should also specify, with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, that the phrase ‘the horror of the West’ should not be primarily understood in terms of a geographical ground where psychic and political horrors occur (though such horrors continue to take place). Rather, this phrase conveys the metaphysical realization that ‘the West is the horror’: that is, that no matter where the horror appears, its ‘truth’ or ‘essence’ continues to be founded on a Western logos that produces such praxis – from its Greek (Platonic) figuration to its Modern (Heideggerian) destination. Still, if Marlow fundamentally agrees that ‘all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’ (117) – indicating that the leader figure is but the by-product of the dominant ideology that informed him – his initial, past-oriented account of the Romans also indicates to future-oriented readers that the power of mimesis can be mobilized by different Empires and traditions. From the Romans to the Belgians, Germany to the United States, Israel to Afghanistan, Rwanda to Syria and North Korea and beyond, it is increasingly difficult, in the hybrid, mimetic, mediatized world that is ours, to foresee what the true essence of the West ‘is’, where the power of mimesis will ‘appear’, on the basis of which ‘emotion of thought’ it will attack and, above all, how – in what form, through what medium and to what end – it will strike.21
The lesson we might draw from Heart of Darkness is that the essence of mimesis is to lack a proper essence; its being, to lack any ‘proper being’; its emotion to lack a proper thought; its subject, to lack a proper substance. And it is precisely this vertiginous lack of a single ‘essence’, ‘being’, ‘thought’ or ‘substance’ that – as the general economy of Lacoue-Labarthe’s thought has taught us – endows mimesis with the power to multiply masks, dissolve identities and infiltrate power itself. Hence, the difficulty to catch up with this mimetic phantom; hence, the challenge to keep up with the breathtaking rhythm of literary and philosophical writers like Conrad and Lacoue-Labarthe, writers of mimesis whose ‘emotion of thought’ is now passed on to us – to follow up.
Notes
1 This essay is dedicated to the memory of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1940–2007) – for mimetic inspiration. It is substantially revised version of a paper that appeared in Conradiana 41.1–2 (2010): 45–74. I would like to thank J. Hillis Miller for his insightful comments on the present version.
2 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); L’imitation des modernes (Typographies 2) (Paris: Galilée, 1986); La ficiton du politique (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1987); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Nazi Myth’, Critical Inquiry, 16.2 (1990): 291–312.
3 Jacques Derrida, ‘Introduction: Desistance’, in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 1–42, 15.
4 In addition to the work of Lacoue-Labarthe, my understanding of mimesis is informed by René Girard’s ‘mimetic theory’. See, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966); Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). It also owes much to the teaching and work of Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, himself a former student and colleague of Lacoue-Labarthe. See Borch-Jacobsen, The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, Affect, trans. Douglass Brick and others (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992); The Freudian Subject, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988.
5 I take it to be a confirmation of Lacoue-Labarthe’s claim that mimesis comes first, that the ‘original’ version of this paper – written and accepted for publication before the appearance of ‘L’horreur occidentale’ – draws its source of inspiration from Lacoue-Labarthe’s philosophical work – on mimesis. For a study on modernism and mimesis, see Nidesh Lawtoo, The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious. Michigan State University Press (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013).
6 On Plato’s narratological categories, see Hillis Miller’s ‘Prologue’ as well as my ‘Frame’. If Miller stresses the realistic (representational) implications of Lacoue-Labarthe’s understanding of mimesis, I focus more on the theatrical (affective) implications of mimesis. Both tendencies inform Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading and supplement each other.
7 Plato, Republic, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, eds. E. Hamilton, H. Cairns, trans. Paul Shorey (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), 575–844, 3.393c, 638.
8 Plato, Republic, 3.393c, 638.
9 For the distinction between lexis and logos, see Plato, Republic, 3.392d, 637.
10 On the link between somnambulism and imitation, see Gabriel Tarde, Les lois de l’imitation (Paris: Ed. Kimé, 1993), 82 n3.
11 I discuss Conrad’s relation to crowd psychology in The Phantom of the Ego.
12 In Ion, Socrates relies on this concept in order to critique the rhapsodey and, via through him, the poet. See Ion, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, trans. Lane Cooper, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), 216–28, 534c–d, 220. Lacoue-Labarthe, following Plato, considers enthusiasm a form of ‘passive mimesis’ that renders the ‘subject absent to itself’ (Imitation, 32–3).
13 Plato, Republic, 2.377b, 624. For Lacoue-Labarthe’s illuminating discussion of ‘the psychology of the Republic’, see ‘Typography’, in Typography, 43–138.
14 I would like to thank William Johnsen for this reminder.
15 For an analysis of ‘frenzy’ in terms of mimesis and possession trance that serves as a sequel to this essay, see Nidesh Lawtoo ‘A Picture of Europe: Possession Trance in Heart of Darkness’. Novel 45.3 (2012) (forthcoming).
16 Chinua Achebe, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Heart of Darkness’ in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 4th ed., ed. Paul B. Armstrong (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 336–49, 339.
17 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul B. Armstrong (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 3–77, 36.
18 Hillis Miller usefully pointed out that this duality is close to his conception of ‘irony’, an irony which, as we shall see, is persistent in Marlow’s double voice.
19 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Armstrong, 91.
20 See Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘Le paradoxe de la mimesis’ in L’imitation des modernes, 15–35.
21 I mention in passing that the recent revolutionary movements in North Africa (or ‘Arab Spring’) offer us a striking example of the liberating forces of mimetic contagion, forces that use different forms of mass media (from the internet to mobile phones) to put an end to the horror of totalitarian regimes. An indication that mimesis ‘itself’ is beyond good and evil.