La lettre, Lacan, Lacoue-Labarthe: Heart of Darkness redux1
STEPHEN ROSS
I follow Hillis Miller’s contention in his ‘Prologue’ to this volume as he states:
[T]he narrative of Heart of Darkness [i]s a way of indirectly speaking about, and bearing witness to, something that cannot be spoken of literally or directly but only in parable or allegory, and that can be borne witness to only in a sequence of voices, each speaking for the one before’ (26).
As his reading differs from Lacoue-Labarthe’s, though, so mine deviates from Miller’s in its determination to use Jacques Lacan’s theories to name the ‘something that cannot be spoken of’ as the real of desire. I suggest that the horror in Heart of Darkness is Kurtz’s discovery that he is ‘hollow at the core’; that his subjectivity is anchored by a void that threatens to absorb consciousness and yet sustains it as well. The parallel with the barbaric dark side of Western imperialism and with the brutality underwriting imperialist eloquence is neither accidental nor inconsequential. My reading demonstrates how Heart of Darkness functions as a critique of Western imperialism (as Lacoue-Labarthe has it) and as an account of a universal aspect of human subjectivity (as Miller has it). I contend that in addition Heart of Darkness illuminates the extent to which these two elements are interwoven through the fetishistic machinations of ideology.
There is an ethical dimension to this consideration of ideology in Heart of Darkness that is also at work, though quietly and secretly, in both Lacoue-Labarthe’s and Miller’s essays. Heart of Darkness’s concern with imperialism, race, capitalism, fidelity and duty makes ethics its most fundamental horizon of engagement; its concern with alterity in all these registers and its refusal to hypostatize alterity for hegemonic recontainment makes it a crucial pre-text to the late twentieth century ethical theories of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. This connection between Conrad and Derrida/Levinas is precisely what functions in Lacoue-Labarthe’s and Miller’s texts as their crypto-ethical engagement and, perhaps, their fundamental raison d’être.
Lacoue-Labarthe’s essay commences with words that could have come verbatim from the ‘Exordium’ of Derrida’s Specters of Marx: ‘Je voudrais, devant vous, ce soir, essayer de me justifier’ (111). Lacoue-Labarthe is specific: though he has begun with what he claims was a ‘rash phrase’, he seeks to justify not the phrase, but himself. Something larger is at stake here than a simple assessment of Conrad’s novel. The discourse thus invoked fades from such prominent display but reappears in Lacoue-Labarthe’s equation of the heart of darkness with the ‘interior intimo meo of Augustine’ (117) and in the distinction he makes between ‘knowledge’ and ‘know-how’, paralleling Levinas’s distinction between wisdom and knowledge in ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’. It returns most persistently, though, in Lacoue-Labarthe’s recurrence to the word ‘figure’. In English, an important nuance is lost: though figure means figure – shape, image, even eidos – in both English and French, in French it has an additional meaning: face. Time and again, Lacoue-Labarthe invokes la figure to describe Kurtz (115, 117), l’artiste maudit (115), the artist as ‘the figure par excellence of the West’ (115) and mythic heroes’ buffonic counterparts, such as Sancho Panza, Rameau’s nephew, Jacques le fataliste and even the Intended (117). I do not wish to press too hard upon these delicate indications but only to follow Jean-Luc Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s lead in The Title of the Letter. There, in considering metonymy in Lacan’s ‘The Agency of the Letter’, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy provide an ideal means of reading the figure/figure double meaning I detect as a sign of ethical engagement in ‘The Horror of the West’: ‘metonymy is related to censorship . . . a forbidden truth is able to be inscribed in the “word to word”’.2 For Levinas, the face is an important metonym for the Other. For Lacoue-Labarthe, invoking the two-faced nature of figure/figure as it looks simultaneously towards French and English, rhetoric and ethics, myth and narratology, it leads us also with its knowing glance to a subterranean ethical engagement. The semantic tangle here is awesome: la figure as the face of the other is also a representation or a mask behind which we hide, embedding within itself also la figue (fig-leaf), with which we cover up our nakedness from the other’s gaze.3 Thus does Lacoue-Labarthe’s hyperbolic effort to justify himself gain heft and evoke a concern with the ethics of alterity (an ethics bound to desire through the persistent alterity of glissage – or difference – as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy note).4
The ethics of Miller’s essay are less concealed, opening as he does with a claim to bear witness to difference, and begging excuse for his divergence from Lacoue-Labarthe’s interpretation. They are also, however, more confusing, since Miller invokes a slightly revised version of Matthew Arnold’s distinction between the Hebraic and the Hellenic to delineate the differences between himself and Lacoue-Labarthe: ‘The other way to specify the methodological difference between us is to say that Lacoue-Labarthe’s approach is more Greek or Hellenic, whereas mine is more Biblical’ (23). Miller replaces Arnold’s ‘Hebraic’ with ‘Biblical’, drawing in an explicitly ethical framework for his methodological difference from Lacoue-Labarthe. Is there a sidelong reference here to the Judaic hermeneutics of Levinas and Derrida? Miller’s next reference opposes his own recourse to ‘the Christian Bible’ to the Greek tradition and even invokes the Gospels (25). Things are no clearer when Miller reverts to simply ‘biblical’ to describe his orientation, though he does thereafter invoke the apocalypse, the Book of Revelation, and allegory as some of his key reference points (the Bible’s Greekness is inescapable). All this indicates a strong ethical concern as a prominent subtext to Miller’s polite difference of interpretation with Lacoue-Labarthe. There is a coherence in contradiction, then, in the two most prominent contributions to this volume, one which may well, as Derrida has taught us, express the force of a desire.5
The similarity between Lacoue-Labarthe’s (and Miller’s) crypto-ethics and Conrad’s more overt but still elusive ethics is the key to understanding both the urgency with which Heart of Darkness can still speak to us today and the need to understand aright Lacoue-Labarthe’s insights into it. I argue that the novel is concerned with incipient global capitalism rather than a specifically nineteenth-century nation-based imperialism, that it concentrates its engagement with global capitalism on its impact upon the psyches of its subjects and that this focus links the political and the ethical directly.
As Lacoue-Labarthe suggests, the elusive kernel of the tale lies in its uncanny insights into the fusion of the psychic and the social in modernity. This aspect of the novella has been surprisingly resistant to analysis despite the virtual industry devoted to interpreting it, but ‘The Horror of the West’ provides the ideal stimulus for reconsidering how the psychic and the social are imbricated in Heart of Darkness.6 Lacoue-Labarthe’s comments go straight to the heart of the fusion of the psychic and the social which characterizes Conrad’s great strengths as a writer and the particular effectiveness of Heart of Darkness as a critique of imperialism. The fundamental nexus of the psychic and the social in Conrad’s tale is where the imperatives of Western imperialism’s greed infect the structures of subjectivity: desire (and its constant chaperone, ethics). Conrad shows how ideology creates a frictionless back-and-forth between the psychic and the social, how it produces subjects ideally suited to capitalist economics and how it makes capitalism seem a natural expression of desire. His depiction of the human costs of this operation is unflinching. He undertakes this exposé with the heart of an artist, penning not just a political critique of imperialism but a sophisticated tale that advances the theory and practice of narrative itself by embedding his critique in the structure and texture of his novella.
Social organization
Conrad’s engagement with his contemporary culture is best delineated in relation to capitalism. As the primary feature of modernity, capitalism encompasses other characteristically modern phenomena like rationalization and secularization. Capitalism’s remarkable malleability answers to Marshall Berman’s characterization of modernity as a cultural situation of ‘permanent revolution’7 ensuring not only its survival but also its increasing domination of all aspects of life. The single most important feature of capitalist modernity informing my discussion here is its power to produce specifically modern subjectivities. In Marx’s classic formulation, capitalist modernity ‘not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object’.8 This element of modernity turns on the manipulation of desire, forming the focal point of Conrad’s critique.
The social organization of Heart of Darkness – captured in the corporate culture of the ‘Company’ – is a metonym for modernity. It is powerfully linked to the psychic through the symbolic order. In the novel’s primal scene, young Marlow pores over maps, lingering over the ‘blank spaces’. ‘The biggest – the most blank, so to speak’ (52) is the heart of Africa. From the Western perspective, these blank spaces are but undiscovered dominions, lacking proper social organization, civilization and especially enlightenment. It is somewhat perplexing, then, to find that the exploration and mapping that take place between the time of Marlow’s youth and maturity appear not as illumination but darkening:
[B]y this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery – a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness. (52)9
The delightful mystery of the blank spaces’ utopian promise is darkened with the elimination of their promise of alterity and the evacuation of any ethical possibility that might have been latent in what Marlow understood as their pure potentiality. Just as the application of the symbolic to the real produces reality as the organized world in which subjects exist, so its application to the spaces indicated by blankness on the map produces geographical reality and eliminates alternative possibilities in its claim to make knowledge and truth align perfectly – the quintessence of the unethical, according to Levinas.10 This production of geographical reality is an ideological procedure whose opacity masquerades as transparency and universalizing a particular perspective. And yet Marlow alerts us to the artificiality of this process when he describes the changes made to the mapped area not as filling in representations of geographical features but as the advent of ‘lakes and rivers’ themselves. Their origin in symbolic fiat is reinforced by their association in a semantic group with ‘names’: ‘rivers and lakes and names’. The gap he thus opens up preserves something of the original alterity that exploration has sought to obliterate and creates a linguistic preserve for ethical possibility to which he will return throughout the novel.
In this case, the particular symbolic order manifest in mapping is that of capitalist modernity, culminating in monopolistic trading concerns driven by the profit motive and the steam engine (52–3).11 Conrad lays out this ideological dimension by linking the darkening strokes of mapping to the black ink used to indicate profit in accounting. A graphological counterpart to the delineation of ‘lakes and rivers’ in the mapping process, the ledger-work of accounting, translates geographical exploration into figures of profit. This connection is reinforced by the chief accountant, whose importance is signalled in part by his position as the gatekeeper to the river at the Outer Station, an important point at which the symbolic map is tethered to the real landscape. His ability to create order out of chaos – to account for everything – by reducing everything to figures in a ledger forges a conceptual link with mapping’s power to make order out of the unruly landscape through a symbolic grid of coordinates. This set of associations takes on the dimensions of a critique of capitalist modernity in light of the privileged position Conrad gives ‘the Company’ over any political entity as the driving force behind the mapping process. Conrad makes a decisive point here as he pushes aside the predominant conception of imperialism as a nationally driven endeavour, instead of making a private for-profit enterprise the chief agency at work in the region: multinational capitalism as modernity’s defining feature.
The reality of the social organization thus produced is grounded in one particular signifier, a commodity which is of the essence of Africa and vital to European profit margins, which usurps the place of God – or any ethical guarantee – in the novel: ivory. ‘The word “ivory” rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think [the “pilgrims”] were praying to it’ (76). Lacoue-Labarthe gestures towards the role played by ivory in Heart of Darkness as a manifestation of the Lacanian Thing, claiming that ‘the horror is Western barbarity itself, because it is the plain underside of the fascination with the Thing’ (118). Representing the Thing, ivory functions for Kurtz as the signifier of the impossible, that which eludes and robs all power of both ‘potentia and potestas’ (117). This philosophical register is crucial because it illuminates, as simple economic theory never can, the role played by ivory as much more than a commodity. Ivory justifies the Company’s presence in the Congo and organizes all commercial activity; it lures Kurtz there in the novella’s prehistory, sends Marlow after Kurtz and even draws the Intended into its web of influence at the novella’s close. Though actual ivory is the object of the materialist operation of the Company’s interests, its real power lies in its status as a fetishized signifier, a
quasi-sacred point de caption grounding the ideological field of ‘reality’ as dictated by the profit motive. Marlow points this out when he directs our attention to ‘ivory’ as a mantra rather than a material good; like Kurtz, it exists as a signifier long before we see it.
Consistent with its status as a point de caption, ‘ivory’ also functions as the objet a – the object-cause of desire – further tightening the bonds between the psychic and the social in Heart of Darkness. Here, fetishization becomes explicitly psychological as the twin registers of libidinal and capitalist desire converge on a single signifier. The transferal of libidinal desire onto the object of capitalist desire replicates and reinforces the process by which exchange value transforms the product into a fetishized commodity. This entire process is bound up with the colonization of libidinal desire by capitalism as modernity transforms subjectivity. Ivory’s status as both corporate and individual point de caption/objet a thus links corporate desire to personal desire. Marlow’s emphasis on its status as a fetishized signifier foregrounds desire as both a psychological and ideological element of the novella’s social organization.
Backing up the de facto potency/potestas of ‘ivory’ to ground the ideological field in Heart of Darkness is the establishment of an entire legal (but in no sense ethical) system around it. In this respect, the Company’s profit-driven hegemony extends to a configuration of the law that corresponds closely to Lacan’s formulation in ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language’. The most salient point of this formulation is that the law is at root the law of the signifier: ‘the law of man has been the law of language since the first words of recognition presided over the first gifts’.12 The logic of substitution and supplementarity intrinsic to the operation of language permeates all aspects of social exchange for Lacan, from gift-giving through marital contracts to larger social pacts and treaties.13 In this, the law is both universal and local, trans-historical and contingent: it governs all exchange from the most basic offering of a signifier in place of a material item to the elaborate fusions of the libidinal with the socio-commercial in marriage and the highly specialized terms of exchange involved in pacts, prohibitions and licenses.
The law in Heart of Darkness operates analogously, taking its universal dimension from the Company’s hegemony, and its particularity from the Company’s designation of ivory as the sine qua non of exchange in the region, and its use of ivory to redraw the boundaries of good and evil. The Company’s power to dictate the law and thus to manipulate reality itself brings us back to Lacan’s emphasis on the law as the law of the signifier, via Marlow’s emphasis on ‘ivory’ (the signifier) as the fundamental element in the ideological field he enters when he signs on with the Company. Taken together, Lacan’s theory and Marlow’s description bring to light the constitutive interrelationship between signification and desire in the ideological field of Heart of Darkness, even as they point to the larger field of modernity with which both Conrad and Lacan engaged.
Marlow’s insistence that the introduction of the law has actually produced criminality exemplifies how the law’s arbitrary relationship between signification and reality informs the Company’s social organization of the Congo:
A slight clinking behind me made me turn my head. Six black men advanced in a file toiling up the path . . . They were called criminals and the outraged law like the bursting shells had come to them, an insoluble mystery from the sea. (64; my emphasis)
The men are only criminals because the law labels them so; their relative goodness or badness is openly the result of a speech act. The absurdity of this designation manifests fully when Marlow considers the Harlequin’s assertion that the heads outside Kurtz’s hut are those of rebels: ‘Rebels! What would be the next definition I was to hear. There had been enemies, criminals, workers—and these were—rebels’ (132). Marlow links the logic behind the arbitrary law of modernity to the ‘unsound methods’ of Kurtz’s administration at the Inner Station. Prior to the advent of the law, the men Marlow sees at the Outer Station could hardly even have been called criminals, let alone been criminals; the introduction of a social order driven by profit introduces a value system whereby there can be ‘something in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while another must not look at a halter’ (78). At a stroke, Marlow brings the Foucauldian insight that the law produces criminality together with the Nietzschean insight that the law’s denomination of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ signify according to temporal power, not transcendental authority.
The connection between the arbitrariness of the law and the economic imperatives behind the Company’s hegemony in the Congo solidifies when Marlow stumbles into the grove of death: the ‘criminals’ are guilty only of being physically capable of furthering the Company’s interests. When this capability expires, their sentence of hard labour becomes a death sentence:
The work was going on. The work! And this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die.
They were dying slowly – it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now,—nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. (66)
Neither ‘enemies’ nor ‘criminals’, these men are simply ‘helpers’ who have outlived their usefulness. Marlow’s bizarre use of the term ‘helpers’ points to the difficulty of reconciling what he sees with the signification options left to him by the Company’s lexicon: He cannot call them law-abiding, since they have been deemed ‘criminals’, nor ‘slaves’, since this would be to accuse the Company of behaving illegally. Calling them ‘workers’ would complicate matters for him even more as it would place them in the same category in which his aunt places him when she calls him a ‘Worker’ (59). ‘Helpers’ thus attempts to balance these equally inadmissible options even as it exposes the dynamic of legalistic inversion and the absence of any ethical standard at work in the Company’s governance of Congo.
In the traditional order of punishment by labour, a law is instituted, the violation of which condemns the criminal to hard labour as a servant (rather than an ‘enemy’) of the state. The work is a corollary to the law, supplementing a reparation for damage done to the social organization. In the Company’s inversion of this process, the demand for work is prior. The law is put in place to generate a captive work force, not to ensure the social organization’s stability. It is legislated slavery accomplished according to the arbitrary logic of signification and the potency of speech acts. Marlow’s inability to assimilate the truth of the situation indicates the difficulty of Conrad’s critique and emphasizes how modernity’s recognition of the arbitrariness of the law can give way to its appropriation by vested interests.
The underlying principle of the law in Heart of Darkness is the imperative to suspend and defer gratification of individual desire in favour of the corporate will. In this regard, the Company’s law is strikingly similar to the psychic law by which the infant enters the symbolic order. Both socially and psychically, compliance with the command of the father merits admission to the community. By this mechanism, the ostensibly willing containment of desire is imbued with ethical value; it is an individual sacrifice which serves the greater good. This doubling and the problems that arise when desire is freed from constraint anchor both Lacan’s and Conrad’s engagements with modernity and articulate the basic interdependence which structures and textures Heart of Darkness.
From Marlow’s first contemplation of the ‘blank spaces’ on the map to his participation in the darkening work of imperialism, Conrad creates a microcosm of modernity in Heart of Darkness. Positing incipient global capitalism as the horizon of the social organization by exposing the fetishization of ivory as the ideological point de caption of the social organization, Conrad makes the Company, rather than any nation, the chief power in the land. He drives home the implications of this view of modernity by focusing on the Company’s power as the source and force of the law. Starting with the Company’s ability to create an entire class of ‘criminals’ by discursive fiat, Conrad draws our attention to how such constructions not only displace people and despoil landscapes but also alter identities and reconfigure subjectivities. This final step in the establishment of a social organization, the ideological field on which the narrative unfolds, sets the stage for a closer consideration of how that ideological field impinges upon those to whom its basic principles seem inevitable, if not natural and just – people like Marlow, Kurtz and the Intended.
The critique of modernity in Heart of Darkness is most compellingly articulated in the narrative of libidinal desire and disrupted family romance behind Kurtz’s disintegration. Behind Marlow’s journey up the river to fetch Kurtz is a domestic setting that accounts for Kurtz’s decision to go to Congo and for his savage behaviour there. The claim that ‘All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’ (117), incisive as it is, masks an obscure family romance in which his father is never mentioned, and his mother is mentioned only when she dies, attended, significantly, by his fiancée, the Intended. The absence of a father places the burden of Kurtz’s psychic history on his mother; when she dies in the company of his Intended, the family romance is suspended. Absent siblings or parents, the Kurtz family romance threatens to terminate, and the Intended is cathected with the entire libidinal burden of familial continuity.
The chief way Conrad draws our attention to the importance of this cathexis is by calling Kurtz’s fiancée simply ‘his Intended’. Conrad capitalizes on this overt signification by wedding it to his commentary on signification and its role in constructing the reality we encounter. The signifier ‘Intended’ marks Kurtz’s fiancée’s place in the symbolic order surrounding Kurtz and defines her subjectivity as a signifier for other signifiers. The capitalization of ‘Intended’ recalls Marlow’s aunt’s characterization of him as ‘one of the Workers, with a capital – you know’ (59), and aligns her with other characters who are defined only generically: workers, helpers, criminals, Accountant, Lawyer, etc. The Intended materializes the narrative’s concern with the deflections, deferrals and suspensions of desire and raises pertinent questions about the ethics of that concern. Conrad extends the Intended’s cathexis by aligning her with wealth: Kurtz speaks of ‘his Intended’ in the same breath as he speaks of ‘his ivory’ (116), making her the libidinal counterpart of the ivory, but also aligning her with the kind of intractable alterity that prevents total possession. The generality accorded by her identifier subtends her specific role in relation to Kurtz and makes her an emblem of modernity’s interference with its subjects’ libidos. The narrative’s concern with signification comes to the fore here, as ‘Intended’ functions on both the subjective and the cultural levels, inscribing the differential logic of desire into the warp and woof of Marlow’s tale and preserving her as the figure of a certain ‘otherwise than being’. The designation of Kurtz’s fiancée as ‘his Intended’ also masks the economic imperative that produces her identity as a figure of perpetually deferred desire. Marlow tells us:
I had heard that her engagement with Kurtz had been disapproved by her people. He wasn’t rich enough or something. And indeed I don’t know whether he had not been a pauper all his life. He had given me some reason to infer that it was his impatience of comparative poverty that drove him out there. (159)
This description reveals the vulgar economic reality behind Kurtz’s decision to go to Congo. For all the ethical bombast of his ‘burning noble words’ about exerting ‘a power for good practically unbounded’ (118), Kurtz goes to Congo with the pragmatic aim of making his fortune. As Lacoue-Labarthe says, ‘Kurtz’s eloquence is systematically linked . . . to the void that is within him or, more exactly, the void that he “is”’ (116). Lacoue-Labarthe does not link this existential void to Kurtz’s economic woes, but Conrad does. Kurtz finds his déhiscence endlessly repeated in the economic realities that prohibit libidinal gratification and even love: his penury prevents him from taking the place of the father and perverts his libidinal energy into imperialism. At root, Kurtz is a victim of the impingement of economic imperatives into the libidinal life of the subject. His desire for the Intended is thwarted by considerations of wealth; in response, he undertakes a dangerous but also lucrative enterprise to earn the satisfaction of his libidinal desire – all under the sign of such empty eloquence as assuages public uneasiness about imperialism, and private qualms about the pursuit of sexual gratification, social status and respectability.
Kurtz buys into the very system that so reduces him: he ties his own worth to his wealth and pursues the Intended as a commodity. He goes off to become a self-made man, intending to use the machinery of capitalist social climbing to gratify his libido, sacrificing ethical considerations to the pleasure principle. His determination to master the machinery that produced him leads Lacoue-Labarthe to call him ‘absolutely sovereign’ (116) as he both flaunts and tries to eradicate his déhiscence. He is ex-ceptional, ex-centric, ex-treme, ex-timate; the outward embodiment of the void at subjectivity’s core. He is also uncanny, not ‘only a voice’ (114) but also a ‘spectre’, an external manifestation of an internal trauma. Driven by his frustrated libidinal desire, Kurtz makes a Faustian deal with the Company, enters the capitalist realm where satisfaction exists only in the perpetuation of desire, and pursues a career that enacts the asymptotic logic of desire – a logic that ultimately leads to his horror and death. He thus exemplifies the interplay between the social and the psychic, experiencing, in his journey towards ‘the horror’, the specifically capitalist exploitation of the universal psychic reality of desire.
Critics are right to assume that Kurtz loses all restraint in his quest for total domination; what they have missed is that the ‘colossal scale of his vile desires’ (156) is continuous with his repressed desire for the Intended. The Intended, intention itself, is the in-tension of subjectivity, the alterity, the kernel of the real of desire that ought to guarantee an ethical orientation in the world. For Kurtz, though, it becomes the impetus for a collapse that does not even rise to the level of going beyond good and evil. The monstrous desires Kurtz indulges while being the warlord of the Inner Station directly result from his frustrated desire for the Intended as it is exacerbated by his ‘comparative poverty’ (159) and his inability to overcome the insistent alterity within. It is no accident that the two chief outlets of his desire while in charge of the Inner Station are sexual license and the procurement of ‘more ivory than all the other agents together’ (113).
The flipside to this tale of repression is Kurtz’s relationship with his African concubine. ‘[W]ild and gorgeous . . . savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent’ (135–6), the African woman is a conventionally imperialist figure of the other as passionate savage. She has ‘the value of several elephant tusks upon her’ (135) in addition to her other adornment, suggesting that she is Kurtz’s sexual partner. The African woman’s ivory adornments replay the equation of wealth and libidinal desire that characterizes Kurtz’s relationship with the Intended. The connection between libidinal and material accumulation suggested with the Intended is stated baldly here and re-focused on the figure of the other. Whereas Kurtz had been prevented by his economic situation from giving the Intended the all-important gift of a ring, however, he is able to adorn his concubine lavishly. Kurtz has not merely sated his lust for wealth; he has also transformed that wealth into libidinal enjoyment. The binary of African woman/Intended combines with the associative logic of enjoyment/repression to suggest that the African woman stands for jouissance while the Intended stands for its suspension and deferral.14 In contrast to the restrictively civilized conduct of the Intended’s family, the African woman embodies both surplus wealth and surplus enjoyment, and perhaps articulates a secret about desire itself in her concrete figuration of alterity.
The twin forces of libidinal and economic desire reveal to Kurtz the reality of desire and prompt his famous last words. In gratifying his ‘various lusts’, Kurtz becomes possessed by ‘the heavy mute spell of the wilderness that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions’ (144). Supported in this ‘spell’ by a social organization that arbitrarily redraws the limits of good and evil to maximize profits, Kurtz exceeds even the loose limits of laissez-faire profiteering. His ‘unsound methods’ are tolerated only so long as he continues to ship ivory with the correct paperwork and to buy supplies from the Company stores. His sovereignty remains within limits that serve a larger system; he is exceptional, but not yet sovereign. All this changes when Kurtz withholds ivory and repudiates the Company’s monopoly on supplies (90). With this move, he goes beyond breaking the law to eschewing all law together. He declares a state of exception that reduces everyone else in Congo to the status of homo sacer and provokes his own parallel reduction. Nearing the end of his desire, Kurtz abandons social restraints altogether and surrenders to instinctual gratification. Regressing to primary narcissism through the gratification of desire – as encouraged and facilitated by the Company’s profit ethic – Kurtz discovers the interior intimo meo in its full demand for pure jouissance – and blasts out of all recognition the question of ethics. Alterity emerges full-blown from within instead of approaching from without and demands that he figure it out.
Yet Kurtz is unable finally to complete this regression, just as he is ultimately unable to satiate his desire: tenuous though it may be, subjectivity dies hard. Instead, he finds that the loss which drives him in his quest for the objet a is irremediable, just as there can never be enough ivory to satisfy the Company. Marlow says as much of the heads outside Kurtz’s hut:
They only showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him—some small matter which when the pressing need arose could not be found under his magnificent eloquence. Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can’t say. I think the knowledge came to him at last—only at the very last. (131)
Marlow hits on the crux of Kurtz’s tragedy: the discovery that desire remains insatiable because it originates from a deep psychic wound which nothing can heal: what is experienced as loss is actually lack. The ‘something wanting’ in him is the déhiscence of subjectivity, the gap between signifier and signified which structures and drives subjectivity. Having exhausted the external channels for satiation of his desire, Kurtz looks inward. He plays out a crisis of subjectivity as he takes introspection to its logical conclusion, glimpsing in his final moment that jouissance and death are one and the same end of desire.
It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—‘The horror! The horror!’ (149)
Beginning with cliché of blinding insight, Marlow focuses on vision as the primary modality of Kurtz’s ‘supreme moment of complete knowledge’. Kurtz’s vision is of the hollowness within, of the death drive behind desire: ‘desire, temptation, and surrender’. It remains beyond the reach of symbolization, beyond articulation, a vision of irremediable absence/alterity at the heart of subjectivity. The unrepresentable substance of Kurtz’s vision provokes the series of expressions (‘pride . . . power . . . craven terror . . . hopeless despair’) as he approaches his definitive moment. Eyeballs rolling up in death as they do in jouissance, Kurtz glimpses déhiscence and expresses it the only way he can: by crying out a warning that applies equally to the universal structure of subjectivity and to the particular system which exploits it.
The circuit of desire which reaches ‘the farthest point of navigation and the culminating point of . . . experience’ (51) in Kurtz’s final words terminates when Marlow visits the Intended. The Intended is striking in her deathly stasis: ‘She came forward all in black with a pale head, floating towards me in the dusk’ (156–7):
[S]he was one of those creatures that are not the playthings of Time. For her he had died only yesterday. . . I saw her and him in the same instant of time—his death and her sorrow—I saw her sorrow in the very moment of his death. (157)
Seemingly impervious to the passage of time, the Intended lives (dies?) the suspension of desire which she also represents: her position as the object of Kurtz’s desire fossilizes with his death. The sepulchral setting causes Marlow to experience a collapse of time akin to the Intended’s and to re-experience Kurtz’s final vision. The Intended’s drawing room correlates precisely enough to Kurtz’s dying vision that Marlow panics. Despite his effort to withdraw from the abyss that swallowed Kurtz, he has arrived at the same place – a letter always reaches its destination. He has a vision of Kurtz ‘on the stretcher opening his mouth voraciously as if to devour all the earth with all its mankind . . . a shadow insatiable’ (155). This vision ‘seem[s] to enter the house with’ Marlow as though the entire momentum of unrestrained instinct unleashed by Kurtz were invading the sanctuary of suspended desire: ‘It was a moment of triumph for the wilderness, an invading and vengeful rush which it seemed to me I would have to keep back alone for the salvation of another soul’ (156). When Marlow recalls Kurtz’s final words, he both anticipates his lie to the Intended and indicates that he understands their significance. All of these images come together as Marlow, having seen the end of Kurtz’s pursuit of desire, arrives at its origin only to discover that the Intended, in her full allegorical significance, is in fact coterminous with the horror of Kurtz’s final vision: she is the literal object-cause of his desire and figures the possibility of ethics he failed to recognize.
Lacoue-Labarthe articulates Marlow’s role in this regard with remarkable clarity: ‘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’ (114). Each, that is, invents an other to account for the unaccountable. The doubling is multiple: Conrad/Marlow as witnesses, the narrator/Marlow and the narrator/Conrad as storytellers, the reader/narrator as listeners and Marlow/the reader as audiences before mesmerizing speakers. The doubling of narrative perspectives, witnesses, audiences and storytellers, all overlapping and playing multiple roles, often simultaneously, enacts the movement of différance that is inextricable from desire/the death drive.15 Doubling and repetition drive the narrative, forcing it to circle back and devour its own tail as it illuminates the double-bind of incipient global capitalism. In this respect, Heart of Darkness adheres precisely to the model of Marlow’s yarns that the narrator proffers as an interpretative guide early in the tale, and to which Lacoue-Labarthe refers:
[T]o 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)
The novel hides its truth in plain view, with its structure, its characters, the details of its plot, its social setting and its narrative technique all pointing towards the nexus of desire/ethics as the object-cause of the narrative itself. Tracing the particular confluence of forces governing subjectivity in Kurtz’s losing battle with the vagaries of desire as it is exploited by capitalist modernity, Conrad provides the consummate account of the clash of the psychic and the social on the field of modern subjectivity.
Notes
1 A substantially different version of this essay originally appeared in Conradiana 36.1–2 (2004): 65–91.
2 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, The Title of the Letter, trans. Francois Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), 82.
3 I trace here a paradigmatic of the term figure rather than an etymology (see Jacques Lacan, ‘The Instance of the Letter’, in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004), 138–69. In doing so, I draw out the dialectical unconscious of Lacoue-Labarthe’s explicit antipathy towards the mythic dimension of the figure as an aestheticization of totalitarian politics and resistance towards Levinasian ethics. [On the former, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Nazi Myth’, Critical Inquiry, 16.2 (1990): 291–312, 302, 306; on the latter, see Avital Ronell, ‘L’indélicatesse d’un interminable fondu au noir’, Europe 973 (2010): 17–29, 23; on the political implications of the concept of ‘figure’, see also Beth Ash’s contribution to this volume, 184–186 editor’s note].
4 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, The Title of the Letter, 68.
5 Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278–93, 279.
6 See, Edward Garnett, ‘Unsigned review [of Heart of Darkness]’, in Conrad: The Critical Heritage, ed. Norman Sherry (Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 131–3; Andrea White, Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition: Constructing and Deconstructing the Imperial Subject (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Kimberly J. Devlin, ‘The Eye and the Gaze in Heart of Darkness: A Symptomological Reading’, in Modern Fiction Studies 40.4 (1994): 711–35; Tony C. Brown, ‘Cultural Psychosis on the Frontier: The Work of the Darkness in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’, in Studies in the Novel 32.1 (2000): 14–28; Thomas Cousineau, ‘Heart of Darkness: The Outsider Demystified’, in Conradiana 30.2 (1998): 140–51; Tony E. Jackson, The Subject of Modernism: Narrative Alterations in the Fiction of Eliot, Conrad, Woolf, and Joyce (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994); Beth Sharon Ash, Writing in Between. Modernity and Psychosocial Dilemma in the Novels of Joseph Conrad (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999); Marianne DeKoven, Rich and Strange. Gender, History, Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991) and Michael Levenson ‘The Value of Facts in the Heart of Darkness’, in Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 3rd ed (New York: Norton, 1988), 391–405.
7 Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (Toronto: Penguin Books Canada, 1988), 95.
8 Karl Marx, ‘Grundrisse’, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed (New York: Norton, 1978), 221–93, 230. See also Berman All That is Solid Melts Into Air; Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987); Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997 [1968]); Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds., Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930 (Toronto: Penguin Books Canada, 1991); T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981).
9 Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment (New York: Edward Arnold, 1990); Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979); Benita Parry and Walter Allen have remarked upon this oddity of Marlow’s narrative.
10 Emanuel Levinas, ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’, in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1989),
75–87,77–9.
11 Michael Levenson, ‘The Value of Facts in the Heart of Darkness’, 395.
12 Jacques Lacan, ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language’, in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004), 31–106, 61.
13 Lacan, ‘Function’, 61–7.
14 See, Jackson, The Subject of Modernism, 102.
15 On the relation between desire and the death drive, see Dollimore’s contribution to this volume [editor’s note].