Je me demandais, je me demande encore en
quelle langue, sinon celle des morts,
cela l’avait-il traversé et s’était-il écrit.
Une langue, j’en suis convaincu, tout autant
étrangère, à traduire et traduire, sans répit,
que celle que je pense mienne.1
LACOUE-LABARTHE, Phrase
Figure 5.12 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in his apartment in Strasbourg.
1 Speaking of the concluding lines of/Heart of Darkness/Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe writes in/Phrase/:
I would ask myself, and I still ask myself in
which language, if not the one of the dead,
this had traversed him and had been written.
A language, I am convinced, as
foreign, to translate and re-translate, incessantly,
as the one that I think mine. (Editor’s translation)
2 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Strasbourg, April 1995 (© Julien Daniel).
PHILIPPE LACOUE-LABARTHE
The origin of these brief remarks lies in a rash phrase of mine, the kind of declaration one cannot help but make on such occasions. And yet it is based on a real, long-standing and tenacious conviction: Heart of Darkness is one of the greatest texts of Western literature. The phrase is somewhat ‘cut and dried.’ Somewhat emphatic, too. All the same, there it is, just as I had used it, and this is not exactly the moment to regret it.
(The occasion which prompted my declaration was a theatrical representation of this text, or rather, given the extreme rigour of the sober means with which it was staged, a reading: David Warrilow – the actor preferred by the later Beckett – drained by a serious illness and himself living his last moments, was telling Conrad’s tale,1 in all simplicity, standing and leaning against the edge of the stage.2 The reading was in French, a language Conrad had nearly chosen as his own. It was overwhelming: suddenly one could hear this tremendous text as no other intimate or silent reading (even a painstaking one) could have allowed us to hear. We understood it – in all its breadth and depth. Warrilow’s exhausted voice, in its sovereign detachment, prompted an emotion of thought [émotion de la pensée] which I daresay remains, to this day, incomparable. At the end of the performance, I met Pierre Lagarde. We exchanged a few words. Still in the grip of this revelation, I made my rash declaration.)
This evening, in front of you, I would like to try and justify myself. I do not know to which extent what I will say will coincide with your preoccupations or will be inscribed in the general problematic that directly concerns you.3 Nor do I know whether I will manage to explain myself on a subject that remains, for me, in the realm of fascination. This type of exercise, as we know, is a perilous one. I therefore ask you, in advance, to forgive me if my remarks will be a little experimental.
When I say, ‘Heart of Darkness is one of the greatest texts of Western literature’, I am thinking, simultaneously and inextricably, of two things: its mythical power and what constitutes it as an event of thought [événement de pensée].4 It is impossible, in theory, to dissociate these two aspects. 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’ about what it must necessarily think of itself, namely – though you know this already, you have read these pages – that the West is the horror.
For the purposes of exposition, I will have to dissociate these two aspects, nevertheless. I will do this in the most economical way possible.
What is most striking about this text, from the very first reading of it, is the economy of its enunciation. The ‘narrative’ proper (the ascent of the river Congo to the quarters of Kurtz, the enigmatic hero of the fable or muthos) is almost entirely a story told by Marlow, a character about whom we know practically nothing, except that he is or was, according to a law once formulated by Blanchot, the spokesman (the ‘he’) thanks to whom Conrad (the ‘I’) could enter into literature – and enter quite late, as we know. This narrative is in large part autobiographical (written in 1899, it narrates a voyage Conrad made between spring and winter 1890); Conrad never made a secret of it. 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’5 – 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]. And yet, it is not so simple. Before Marlow begins his narrative [récit], we are told, by an anonymous ‘we’, that it is during a conversation among friends – on the deck of a ship anchored in the Thames, waiting for the turn of the tide that will allow it to leave London – that Marlow, reflecting on the Roman colonization of England, decides to give an account of his African adventure. The ‘novel’ [roman], if that is indeed what it is, will last as long as the tide – its ebb, which would have allowed, ultimately, for the ship’s departure, will be missed because of Marlow’s eloquence. The last, vertiginous lines, on the other hand, are pronounced by the narrative voice of Conrad himself (the real ‘I’, then), a voice we had barely heard before, and heard, very shortly and furtively, only twice6:
I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness. (162)7
If we add to this that Marlow’s narrative is itself interrupted, at least once, by one of his listeners, we can see the degree of narrative complexity we are dealing with. This ‘novel’ [roman] is not a narrative [récit], nor is it simply the narrative of a narrative.8 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’ (Conrad) which I have just indicated – taken over, in a mimetic mode, by a new diegesis, which is itself interrupted by mimetic passages.9 And all of this recounts two or rather three things: a night watch in the harbour of London; an initiatory journey into the heart of Africa – and the entire destiny of the West.
I hope you will forgive me for having very hastily conformed to these formal considerations (one should, in truth, pursue a far more meticulous analysis). They are useful nonetheless, and for at least two reasons.
The first is that this device is the device of myth itself, at least in its Western version (let us say, once more: a Platonic version, since, for the sake of convenience and necessity, I have kept to this reference). Beyond the purely formal considerations mentioned earlier, here myth means a spoken word [parole] (neither simply a discourse nor simply a narrative) which offers itself, by means of some testimony, as a bearer of truth, an unverifiable truth, prior to any demonstration or any logical protocol, 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. Conrad’s entire undertaking consists in trying to find a witness for that which he wants to bear witness to. The Ancients invoked the gods, Conrad invents Marlow. But they do so in order to convey the same truth, or at the very least, to convey a truth of the same order.
The second reason is the simple consequence of the first: Conrad’s ‘novel’ does not rely on any characters (I am not saying any figures) but on voices only. It is evident that Marlow is only a voice, the voice of the ‘narrator’ [récitant]. On the other hand, his listeners, on the deck of the ship (‘we’, ‘I’), are practically voiceless: they listen. The ‘characters’ Marlow says he has encountered (e.g. the Russian or, at the end of the narrative, Kurtz’s ‘Intended’) are known only through what they said. In an oratorio (which is probably the true form of this work – but I cannot dwell on it here), their intervention would have given rise to two arias at most. In fact, everything is deliberately constructed around an opposition between two voices: that of the indistinct ‘clamour’ of the savages (the chorus) and that, obviously (and audibly) [bien entendu], of Kurtz – who is, surely, the figure of this myth or the hero of this fiction.
We must look at it more closely.
Even more so than Marlow, Kurtz is himself only a voice. For one, because it is in this way – and, so to speak, only in this way – that Marlow evokes him: ‘The man presented himself as a voice’. ‘A voice. He was very little more than a voice’ (113, 115). This is what Marlow says before meeting Kurtz, and, what is more, at a time when he has almost given up all hope of ever meeting him. If Marlow admits that he always ‘connect[ed] him with some sort of action’ (113), if he recalls, without denying for a moment its truth, the legend that surrounds him (the adventurer, the ivory plunderer, the bloodthirsty despot or the mysterious ‘king’ who subjected a terrorized population, etc.), Marlow retains, of all his gifts, only his ‘ability to talk, his words—the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, . . . the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness’ (113–4). And indeed, Kurtz will remain a voice throughout the entire narrative, from the moment of his long-expected (or prepared) apparition – the ‘deep voice [reaching Marlow] faintly’ (134) – until the moment of his death, in his last whisper where all is revealed: ‘“The horror! The horror!”’ (149); or until the long work of mourning which, later on, governs Marlow’s narrative (‘the voice was gone’ [150]) and rings out, at the end, the silent echo of the last – and henceforth forbidden – word (161–2).
However, if Kurtz is no more than a voice, it is because – and Marlow knows this full well – in his nature or his essence, Kurtz is but a man of (his) word(s) [homme de parole]. I mean by that a mythic being – purely mythic. And it is of course on purpose that I use these equivocal formulas.
On several occasions, Marlow insists on Kurtz’s eloquence, his most obvious gift. He evokes, also, his talents as a writer. Not only does he mention the (‘remarkable’) report on colonization Kurtz wrote at the request of the ‘International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs’ (the manuscript of which, you will recall, includes this terrible sentence, scribbled on the last page: ‘“Exterminate all the brutes!”’ [118]); but he also alludes to his poems (140) – poems, besides, we shall know nothing about. In general, Marlow also speaks of him in terms of an artist; that is to say, as a genius: an extraordinarily gifted man, to the point of being gifted for the ‘action’ (or adventure) which he eventually chose for himself. For that matter, it is difficult, when it comes to Kurtz’s destiny, not to think of Rimbaud’s destiny (as Conrad might have done): the renunciation of literature, the trafficking, the taste for money and power, the voluntary exile (without return), the conquered ‘Royalty’, the final status of a ‘demigod’ (i.e. strictly speaking, of a hero). All of this sums up the figure of an artiste maudit, which is perhaps the most decisive myth of the nineteenth century (and therefore also, in large part, of the twentieth century).
Who is an artist? Or who is a genius? As we learn from Plato, Diderot, Nietzsche, from the great Western tradition (I mean from the Western tradition which recognizes that the artist is the figure par excellence of the West), the artist, or the genius, is he whom nature (physis) has gifted with the innate gift (ingenium) to possess all the gifts that supplement his proper limitation (what the Greeks call techne) – starting with the gift of gifts: language.10 This amounts to saying that the artist, or the genius, is he who is properly proper to everything [proprement propre à tout], or, if you prefer, having no property in himself [propriété en lui-même] (except this mysterious gift), he who is capable of appropriating them all for himself. Diderot has shown this, in a canonical way, via the example of the great actor.11 The artist or the genius is ‘the man without proper qualities’ – the expression which provides Musil’s masterpiece with its title.
This is exactly what Kurtz ‘is’. He is presented not only as a kind of ‘universal genius’ (154), or even as an ‘extremist’ (154) – and as such, someone who will do anything, comparable in this to the Russian anarchists, that is, to the ‘nihilists’, but also as being nothing himself; or as being no one [personne], if we think of Ulysses. His eloquence is systematically linked to the ‘barren darkness of his heart’ (147), to his being ‘hollow at the core’ (131), to the void that is within him or, more exactly, the void that he ‘is’. This is why he is only a voice. But this is also why, in the domain of art proper as in the domain of power (or of political art, if you will), he subdues and fascinates; he attracts and seduces (he even arouses love); he subjugates [assujettit]: he is absolutely sovereign. Being nothing, he is, indeed, everything. His voice is all-powerful.
Two consequences follow:
(1) The first involves the opposition or agôn between the two voices that structure Marlow’s narrative: the savage, undifferentiated clamour and the voice of Kurtz. These are, purely and simply, the voice of nature (physis) and the voice of art (techne). One sentence puts them rigorously in relation to one another: the whisper of savagery ‘echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core’ (131). On the one hand, this is what explains the deep sadness of the clamour that lies behind its apparent savagery or violence and that resonates regularly throughout the entire narrative and punctuates it. It is a lament [plainte] – and, to tell the truth, more than of the suffering of exploitation and slavery which is nevertheless very present, I am thinking of Benjamin’s celebrated phrase: if nature could speak, it would be in order to lament (colonial exploitation being, first and foremost, the exploitation of nature).12 On the other hand, this explains, also, that the horror, the vertigo to which Kurtz falls victim, this horror about which we know basically nothing (What has he seen? What has he suffered? What is he talking about?) is less the ‘savage’ horror itself than the horror revealed by the echo of the clamour within him (in his ‘intimate’ void): it is his ‘proper’ horror, or better, it is the horror of his absence of any proper being [être-propre]. All that we can imagine in terms of savagery, of prehistory, of the reign of pure terror, of abomination and the incomprehensible, of a mystery without name, of cruelty, of the power of darkness; all that pulls him – and with him, all those who are fascinated by him – into the vertigo and leads him even to ecstasy, this ‘black hole’, then, this ‘heart of darkness’, is ‘him’ – his void – as if outside himself [comme hors de lui]. If I may allow myself to use, in front of you, Lacan’s terminology, when he speaks, precisely, of the tragic (I am thinking of his seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis), I would say that the horror is la Chose – the Thing or Ding (another name for being, that is, for nothingness, the ‘nothingness of being’ [le rien d’étant], which Lacan borrows from Heidegger);13 or, if you prefer, that the ‘heart of darkness’ is the extime – the interior intimo meo of Augustine, God, but as internal exclusion. Perhaps evil. . . I leave this question open, at least provisionally.
(2) To say that the horror is ‘him’ – Kurtz – is to say that the horror is us. You will have noticed that the fascination of the horror contaminates all those who, in one way or another, have approached him or heard him: Marlow, of course, but also the Russian (the fool, Kurtz’s derisory double – a fool probably always accompanies a figure, whether this figure is called ‘Don Quichotte, . . . Zarathustra’ . . . and so on), and even Kurtz’s ‘Intended’. It is no accident that all these characters, trapped by the fascination for the Thing, defend themselves by manipulating objects: rivets and white lead, a navigation manual, knitting or a piano. The response to the vertigo of techne is technical agitation. And it is probably also in order to avert the horror (of art) that Kurtz tried to lose ‘himself’ in ivory trafficking and colonial royalty. Therein, precisely, is the lure par excellence, namely, the Western lure itself – that is, as long as the West (and Conrad, as the author of Under Western Eyes, knew what it meant) is understood as that which will have always shrunk from the dread of knowledge (another word to translate, in its full meaning, the Greek techne) by taking refuge in know-how [savoir-faire], and as that which will have always confused ability [capacité] (the gift) with power.
In modern philosophical thought, this is what revealed itself when Nietzsche called the gift (of art) ‘will to power’ and when, under this name, he conceived the essence of mankind as subject. He could not have prevented that ‘power’ as puissance (which means ‘ability’, or even, quite simply, ‘genius’), when linked to will, would merge with ‘power’ as pouvoir: potentia with potestas. We know what followed (and Nietzsche, besides, was the first to fear it). I do not know whether Conrad had read Nietzsche (and this matters little), but what is remarkable is that he saw this with such precision – through the example of colonization. (I mention in passing that Conrad’s book caused a scandal and that Gide had great difficulties establishing its publication in France during the 1920s.) To recoil from the horror is Western barbarity itself, because it is the plain underside of the fascination with the Thing – a fascination that Kurtz, defying all potentia and all potestas, experiences as literally impossible. But when he dies of it, both sanctified and accursed (here a long analysis would be necessary), evil is done: Africa is destroyed – and Westerners (we) will not recover from it.
The implementation of this difficult thought no doubt explains the extraordinary work of writing to which Conrad devoted himself. And Conrad knew perfectly well that he was producing one of the most powerful figurations of the West. (Malraux, a nearly perfect anagram of Marlow, will recall this, at least from La tentation de l’Occident until La voie royale.) I cannot dwell on this here, but I would simply like to mention two, apparently enigmatic enunciations, where Conrad designates his tale,14 that is to say, his myth, as being itself ‘hollow’ – much like its hero. Before attempting to conclude and get somewhat closer to your preoccupations, I will limit myself to quoting these lines:
The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that, sometimes, are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. (48)
There was no sign on the face of nature of this amazing tale that was not so much told as suggested to me in desolate exclamations, completed by shrugs, in interrupted phrases, in hints ending in deep sighs. (129)
Ever since the appearance of the chapter, in Montaigne’s Essays, devoted to the ‘Cannibals’, a long tradition of modern literature (one which leads up to at least Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Clastres) wonders what the West is through what the West does (to ‘others’) – a tradition turned giddy, at bottom (though this bottom is bottomless, is an abyss), with the infinite power of destruction that is its own, its propensity for extermination. Conrad is inscribed in this tradition – to this extent that he makes this giddiness the object of his work, and that is his originality.
From the very beginning of the narrative – that is, from the evocation of the Romans’ encounter with the barbaric and savage ‘darkness’ of future England (‘“And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth”’ [48]), it is clear, one could say, that the West is defined as a gigantic colony – it was also the case with the Greeks, well before Rome – and that, beneath this colony is the horror. But this horror is less the de facto horror of savagery than the power of fascination that savagery exerts over the ‘civilized’ who suddenly recognize the ‘void’ upon which their will to ward off the horror rests – or fails to rest. It is its own horror that the West seeks to dispel. Hence its work of death and destruction, the evil it generates and spreads to the confines of the earth – up to those ‘white’ areas found on the maps of Africa, areas which, at the outset, irresistibly attract Marlow, that is to say, Kurtz. The West exports its intimate evil: it imposes its extime. Such is its curse, and such is the gloom it imposes on the whole world: pain, sadness, an endless lament, a mourning that no work will ever diminish.
Heart of Darkness is a kind of ‘season in hell’ or descent into the realm of the dead based on the model of the Homeric nekyia. When Marlow is welcomed by the knitting women at the Company’s headquarters, the allusion to the Fates is transparent and deliberate. And the references to hell are innumerable. As excess or transgression, the Western hybris is the metaphysical will to pass through death. Marlow’s journey is an initiatory journey. All the material details suggest that its stakes concern the revelation of a technique of death. And this is, after all, the best definition of the Western will to power that may be given – that is, if we keep to the ambiguity of the phrase (both the ambiguity affecting the term ‘technique’ and that resulting from the double genitive). Against the rites of the ‘savages’, which represent perhaps a knowledge of death, Kurtz, the artist (but the failed artist), only ever managed to oppose a technique – of death. As for the artist in-spite-of-himself or by proxy, namely, Marlow, the mythomane who was really horrified by Kurtz’s fate (i.e. who really caught a glimpse of the horror), all he is left with, upon his return, is the artifice of a ‘white lie’. He will not dare tell Kurtz’s ‘Intended’ his last words; instead, he will leave it to love to cover up and disguise the fury of transgression, thus completing the work of sanctification that averts the Western gaze from its wickedness.
Schelling says that ‘myths’ are not ‘allegorical’. They say nothing other than what they say; they do not have a different meaning from the meaning they enunciate. They are tautegorical (a category Schelling borrows from Coleridge).15 Heart of Darkness is no exception to this rule. It is not an allegory – say, a metaphysico-political allegory – at all. It is the tautegory of the West – that is, of art (of techne). That this art, in this particular instance, is literature itself – in other words, the mythical usage of the original techne that is language – leaves open a question that the analytical outline I have just offered here cannot pretend to answer.
I will therefore leave it at that. My hope is that these brief and – I am perfectly aware of it – inchoate remarks will have afforded a glimpse of what is at stake in the horror, that is, the savagery in us.
Trans. Nidesh Lawtoo and Hannes Opelz
Notes
We would like to thank Anne Luyat for reading an early version of the translation and for sharing her feedback with us. Our translation greatly benefited from her helpful stylistic insights [trans. note].
1 In English in the original. Unless otherwise specified, endnotes to this essay are the translators’.
2 The performance, directed by Joël Jouanneau, was staged at the Théâtre de l’Athénée-Louis-Jouvet (Paris) in 1992.
3 This conference was held in the context of a seminar entitled Psychiatrie, Psychothérapie et Culture(s), organized by the association Parole sans frontière in 1995–6. The essay was first published in the proceedings of this conference: Au réel de la frontière, ed. P.-S. Lagarde, B. Piret and K. Khelil (Strasbourg: Association Parole sans frontière & Conseil de l’Europe, 1996), 161–70 [note present in the original], now available online: http://www.p-s-f.com/psf/spip.php?rubrique28, accessed 20 October 2011. It was subsequently reprinted in a special number of the Journal Lignes devoted to Lacoue-Labarthe, following his death: Lignes 22 (May 2007): 224–34. The present translation is based on the latter version.
4 Original in italics.
5 Lacoue-Labarthe is referring to Plato’s discussion of theatrical mimesis in the Republic. In Book 3, Plato defines mimesis as a type of poetic speech whereby the poet/actor does not speak in his proper name but ‘delivers a speech as if he were someone else’. Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton, Huntington Cairns, trans. Paul Shorey (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), 575–844; 3.393c, 638). For Lacoue-Labarthe’s analysis of Plato’s conception of theatrical mimesis, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘Typography’ (1975), in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. and trans. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 43–138.
6 Lacoue-Labarthe is assuming here that the frame narrator is Conrad himself, an assumption which is problematic from a narratological perspective.
7 Lacoue-Labarthe quotes from the French translation, relying on Jean-Jacques Mayoux’s (bilingual) edition of Heart of Darkness: Au cœur des ténèbres, Amy Foster, Le Compagnon secret (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1990). That Lacoue-Labarthe had access to the English version is confirmed by his poem, Phrase, where he cites the concluding lines of Heart of Darkness in English; see Phrase (Paris: Bourgois, 2000), XIV, II 87. The epigraph to this part is a commentary of these lines.
8 Lacoue-Labarthe is relying on Gérard Genette’s narratological distinction between récit understood as narration (the fact of recounting) and récit understood as narrative (the discourse that recounts events in a fictional order) – as opposed to the sequence of events as they really happened (histoire). See, Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, trans. Jane E. Lewin (New York: Cornell University Press, 1988), 13–8.
9 In Book 3 of the Republic, Plato distinguishes three forms of poetic enunciation: ‘pure narration’ (diegesis),‘narrative that is effected through imitation’ (mimesis) and ‘mixed style’. In diegetic speech, ‘the poet himself is the speaker and does not even attempt to suggest that anyone but himself is the speaker’; in mimetic speech, the poet ‘delivers a speech as if he were someone else’ by impersonating his characters; mixed style combines both diegetic and mimetic speech. Plato, Republic, 3.392c–8b, 637–8.
10 Lacoue-Labarthe’s definition of the artist/genius as a figure who supplements his/her limitations through art (techne) emerges from his deconstructive reading of the concept of mimesis as it appears in the works of Plato, Aristotle, Diderot, Nietzsche and other modern philosophers. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, L’imitation des modernes (Paris: Galilée, 1986). On the question of mimesis as ‘supplement’, see 24–9.
11 Lacoue-Labarthe is referring Diderot’s claim, in Le paradoxe sur le comédien, that it is because the great actor ‘is nothing [himself] that he can be everything par excellence’. ‘The paradox is the following’, explains Lacoue-Labarthe: ‘in order to do everything, imitate everything. . . one needs to be nothing in oneself, have nothing proper to oneself’. Lacoue-Labarthe, L’imitation des modernes, 27 (his emphasis).
12 See Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’ (1916), in Selected Writings, vol. I, ed. Michael Jennings et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), 62–74, 72.
13 See Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60. The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, trans. Dennis Porter (London, New York: Routledge, 1992), 76.
14 In English in the original.
15 See F. W. J. Schelling, Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, trans. Mason Richey and Markus Zisselsberger (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007), 136, 187.