The horror of trauma: Mourning or melancholia in Heart of Darkness?
BETH S. ASH
My reading of Heart of Darkness differs from Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading, not just as a dispute between interpretative claims but, as Nidesh Lawtoo has made me see, as a real differend in Lyotard’s technical sense.1 In ‘Emma: Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis’, Lyotard writes: ‘In the differend between philosophers and analysts . . . any philosopher, as philosopher, will find it impossible to intervene in Freudian affairs without redressing them’.2 More recently, Claire Nouvet explains that Lyotard’s ‘Emma’ renounces the hegemony of philosophy in ‘an attempt to think what philosophy has long resisted thinking, but with which psychoanalysis and literature constantly deal: affect’.3 If Lacoue-Labarthe approaches Heart of Darkness as a philosophical or critical myth and, thus, in his words, ‘as a bearer of truth’ (113), in what follows, I approach Conrad’s novella less in terms of truth and more in terms of the psychoanalysis of affect. This will lead me to take a psychoanalytic view of the Kurtz-Marlow relation reframed in the context of a larger crisis in colonial identity, a crisis that Marlow, perhaps more than Kurtz, undergoes. As we shall see, this psycho-political crisis signifies for him a traumatic rupture of a communal bond and leaves him deeply ambivalent towards Kurtz – an ambivalence characteristic of melancholic disconsolation.
I want to emphasize from the outset, however, that the differend between Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading and mine is only in some ways insurmountable, which, of course, means that there are salient points of interplay that make this conflict of interpretations interesting and illuminating. And the conflict is not entirely insurmountable because Lacoue-Labarthe is not entirely the philosopher who corrects psychoanalytic ideas or resists thinking about affect. Lacoue-Labarthe does use psychoanalysis, specifically the Lacanian concept of the ‘Thing’ (la Chose), to dramatize how Kurtz existentially loses the ground under his feet and finds himself in the psychic reality of an unbearable void. One is still mindful that Lacan provides a very philosophical version of psychoanalysis,4 but Lacoue-Labarthe does assist with the discussion of political affect. He has made the significant observation that the concepts or ideas formative of collective subjectivity hold sway over emotions. As he and Nancy put it in ‘The Nazi Myth’, collective ‘emotion always joins itself to concepts’ (their emphasis).5 Lacoue-Labarthe’s real interest is in anatomizing the concept and dispelling the identification more than in the psychic reality of an agonizing loss of social identity. Thus, we might follow Lacoue-Labarthe’s direction to see Kurtz as figuring the communal idea of colonialism, but we must also depart from him and turn to the psycho-logy of investment and disillusionment in order to explore how Marlow suffers the loss of political selfhood.
Lacoue-Labarthe attends in his introduction to his own affecting experience with Heart of Darkness: David Warrilow’s theatrical reading of Conrad’s novella prompted Lacoue-Labarthe truly to hear ‘this tremendous text’ (111). He recounts how this performance evoked ‘an emotion of thought’ in him, and in its grip he made the ‘rash declaration’ that the novella holds the place of ‘one of the greatest texts of Western Literature’ (111). In recounting this affect-thought Lacoue-Labarthe subtly suggests the Kantian model of reflective judgement: that is, in the aesthetic domain, judging relies on sensibility and does without a concept. What must be brought to account, for Lacoue-Labarthe, is precisely his ‘rash declaration’ of the novella’s greatness. For him, in particular, the alert sensibility of reflective judgement seems utterly predisposed towards ideas. Doesn’t his use of the adjective ‘rash’ show some discomfort with the signal of emotion?, a need to make it signify? Lacoue-Labarthe knows that judgement, especially aesthetic judgement, has its roots in affect. And yet, almost irresistibly, he loosens the grip of emotion, makes it yield to understanding Conrad’s greatness by means of illuminating, abstract ideas. The differend of Heart of Darkness as critical myth (Lacoue-Labarthe’s approach) and Heart of Darkness as affective – at points, quite crucially unconscious – text provides for the variations in our respective attention towards the central characters, Kurtz and Marlow. If Lacoue-Labarthe primarily focuses on Kurtz who, in his words ‘is surely the figure of this myth or the hero of this fiction’ (114), I look at Kurtz through Marlow’s narration – primarily how Kurtz affects Marlow.6
Lacoue-Labarthe’s use of the Platonic categories of mimesis and diegesis, his description of the frame narrator of Heart of Darkness as the diegetical voice of the author (the ‘autobiographical’ or ‘real’ Conrad) and his claim that Marlow mimetically stands in for Conrad requires a word of explanation. In ‘Typography’, his 1975 poststructuralist essay on Plato’s Republic, Lacoue-Labarthe shows how Plato’s attempt to distinguish his own responsible mimesis from irresponsible rivals (i.e. that ‘Socrates’ as a speaking figure in the text must reflect the external will or intent of the philosopher) cannot withstand the equivocality of mimesis itself.7 And yet, in ‘The Horror of the West’, Lacoue-Labarthe does not problematize the structure of (external) authorial intentionality as guarantee of its own stable subjectivity within the mimesis of Heart of Darkness. While conceding that ‘a far more meticulous analysis’ (113) of the formal structure of the narrative needs to be done, it seems that Lacoue-Labarthe has given himself philosophical license to bypass Marlow altogether in favour of Conrad. Locating Conrad ‘in’ the text, however, isn’t at all easy. Even more importantly, the very elements that Lacoue-Labarthe describes – this difficulty with enunciation, this heaviness, painfulness and obscurity – first and foremost belong to Marlow, to his telling. As Hillis Miller notes in ‘Revisiting “Heart of Darkness Revisited”’, Marlow’s narrative states of ‘anger’, ‘grief’ and feelings of ‘uneasiness’resonate with the reader.8 I would add that Marlow’s narrative transmits these affective intensities and sometimes cannot articulate any meaning at all, not even ‘obscure’ meaning. Kurtz may very well be ‘the figure of this myth’ (114) as Lacoue-Labarthe’s brilliant reading attests, but it cannot be overlooked that Kurtz, the dead man, has captured Marlow as if he were a hostage. Marlow’s telling reveals this trauma.
Elaborating on the ethical dimension of the differend, Lyotard writes: ‘A case of differend between two parties takes place when the “regulation” of the conflict that opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties, while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom’.9 Isn’t Marlow in a sense wronged by focusing on the ‘truth’ of Kurtz to the exclusion of his own pain? At the very least, we lose the fullness, the density and complexity of Conrad’s narration if Marlow’s traumatic experience is left uninterpreted. There is a black mood in Heart of Darkness that asserts itself and deserves to be read. Marlow’s trauma is ‘not signified’ in Lacoue-Labarthe’s philosophical idiom, but the psychic structures and affects concentrated in Marlow’s relation to Kurtz bid to resurface or return as the ‘other’ of Lacoue-Labarthe’s philosophical reading. My aim in what follows is to show how central motifs in ‘The Horror of the West’ that intriguingly denote the ‘other’ in the philosopher’s argument can be used to read the text both sympathetically with Lacoue-Labarthe and in my contrary direction. I see three central motifs that allow for this reading strategy: the full complexity of colonial identity; loss and melancholia; and the refusal of speech or, as Lacoue-Labarthe puts it, the refusal of ‘truth’. But let us proceed in order.
Affective politics: Kurtz’s myth and Marlow’s response
It is important to begin with Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading of Kurtz as a ‘figure’ for breaching the myth-making powers of the Colonial West and disclosing that, in Lacoue-Labarthe’s words, ‘beneath this colony is the horror’ (119). This reading is in some ways a continuation of the project that Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy set out in Retreating the Political (1979), a major text reflective of their ongoing concern with the philosphico-political ‘figure’. That is to say, first, their claim that an essential identity of the social or political unit is asserted by figurative means and second, their deconstruction of ‘ideal’ figures of the human and the state that allows for an alternative philosophical engagement with politics (the ‘retreat’ of the political). Their argument perhaps in somewhat simplified terms is that the modern history of the political – of the polis as a collective entity – has become the attempt to preserve the Western subject, and this attempt requires the identification of the subject as such. This subject is a metaphysical or an essential and absolute type – the group Subject – which, as Simon Sparks puts it in his ‘Introduction’ to Retreating, is ‘an essence in-common (a community even) on the basis of a figure in-common’.10 The political Subject is asserted in the idiom of art – for example, the Nation as self-creating, or the National Idea as a forming force for unity, or National character traits representing a being-common. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy uncover, in Sparks’s words, ‘a whole theatrics of thinking’ in the political usage of techne, poeisis and mimesis, namely, the essential lexicon of the figure.11 Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading of Heart of Darkness is consistent with the critical project of Retreating because both texts assert that, when the capacity for art, for ‘figuration’/‘fictioning’, enters politics, it is used to mould totalitarian truths. This is readily seen in the fascist aestheticization of the political – for example, in the following statement made by Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda, that ‘the true artist, the one who molds in the most elevated sense, is the [Nazi] Statesman’, a statement that Lacoue-Labarthe describes as ‘a drowsy repetition of Napoleon and Nietzsche’.12
In ‘The Horror of the West’, Lacoue-Labarthe tells us that there is a temptation for Western thought and politics to confuse ‘ability [capacité] (the gift) with power’ (117). That confusion was revealed ‘when Nietzsche called the gift (of art) “will to power” and when, under this name, he conceived the essence of mankind as subject’ (117). In the conduct of political relations, the ‘will to power’ operates when relations are understood as the life of the Subject alone (e.g. ‘the subject of history’) and conducted exclusively on the basis of realizing a being-common (e.g. manifest destiny). The ‘will-to-figure’ is thus the identity principle of Western politics. In their essay, ‘The Nazi Myth’, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy further clarify the idea of the figure as identity principle. They invoke Plato’s conception of myth to do so: ‘Myth is a fiction, in the strong, active sense of fashioning’.13 Note that ‘the will-to-figure’ is synonymous with ‘fashioning’. Myth’s role, they continue, ‘is to propose, if not impose, models or types . . . in imitation of which an individual, or a city, or an entire people, can grasp themselves and identify themselves’.14 It is through cultural myth or, actually, any unifying being-common (i.e. ‘We, the people’, ‘the race’, ‘humanity’) that the ‘mimetic’ identity principle operates, and does so coercively, imposing the form of political thinking and pressuring con-formity.
Kurtz’s pamphlet for ‘The Society for Suppression of Savage Customs’ in part shows how he, the political journalist (the failed artist), figures the colonial myth. The pamphlet says: ‘we whites’ appear to those ‘savages’ as ‘supernatural beings—we approach them with the might as of a deity’; and Marlow comments that ‘it gave [him] the notion of an exotic immensity ruled by an august Benevolence’ (118). In Kurtz’s discourse, the European subject is the Subject, and in Kurtz’s vision of the colonial relation, the world is no longer the world, but rather the world-process of civilizing domination in which the European is fully realized in the rule of a self-creating god, ‘an august Benevolence’. But, of course, Kurtz also provides the ‘valuable’ postscript, ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ (118). Using Lacoue-Labarthe’s term ‘de-figuration’,15 it might be said that this is precisely what happens to Kurtz – that the glory of Kurtz’s representation is de-figured by his demand for genocide.
This philosophical discussion dovetails with Lacoue-Labarthe’s insightful Lacanian view of Kurtz’s darkness, the gist of which is as follows:
[T]he horror, the vertigo to which Kurtz falls victim, this horror about which we know basically nothing . . . 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] . . . the vertigo [that] leads him even to ecstasy, this black hole, then, this ‘heart of darkness’ is him—his void—as if outside himself. . . . 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 riend’étant], which Lacan borrows from Heidegger); or, if you prefer, the ‘heart of darkness’ is the extime—the interior intimo meo of Augustine, God, but as internal exclusion. Perhaps evil . . . (116–17)
Understanding this section depends on several Lacanian ideas that cluster around la Chose. Lacoue-Labarthe seems to be saying in part that Kurtz’s boundless enjoyment – what he terms ‘ecstasy’ but what Lacan refers to as ‘jouissance’ (i.e. what is most exciting to the subject, which includes disgust and horror) – voids Kurtz’s symbolic existence. Kurtz’s ‘void’ is his annulment of his existence granted by the symbolic. It is well known that the Lacanian subject is split, but perhaps less well known that the split subject can be described as split between being and existence, where being is on the side of the (Lacanian) real and existence on the side of the symbolic. We therefore can imagine a real or substantive jouissance before/outside of the symbolic, as Žižek puts it, das Ding, the Thing is ‘the pure substance of enjoyment that is resistant to symbolization’.16 But desire is able only to recover a rem(a)inder of enjoyment in fantasy, through what Lacan calls the object-cause or the object (a). Enjoyment as ‘pure substance’ is known to the subject in the symbolic order only as the radical otherness in the Other (or the lack in the Other), in the first instance, the mOther, who makes her jouissance known only as something that escapes the child or as not for him/her. What is most intimately our own – the fantasy-object as the subject’s partner – is the foreign cause (the jouissance that the other lacks) subjectively internalized.
We are able, then, to see that in Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading, when Kurtz aims at the impossible jouissance (the Thing), his being becomes a symbolic void (he ‘dies’ as a member of the symbolic network) – and so cannot be symbolized or integrated into the symbolic order. As Lacoue-Labarthe puts it, this is ‘a horror about which we [who are placed in the symbolic network] know basically nothing’ (116); a horror that we must ‘imagine’. Yet, as extime, the internal other qua Thing, Kurtz’s being materializes the ‘void’ in us, in our symbolic order. Lacoue-Labarthe goes on to describe that extime as our ‘intimate evil’ as ‘a tradition turned giddy, with the infinite power of destruction that is its own, its propensity for extermination’ (118–19).
This Lacanian reading of Kurtz as West’s own dark void (or death drive) is truly illuminating; it also resonates with a more explicit treatment of Lacan’s theory that there is a lack or a void at the heart of the symbolic order – which is found in Žižek’s discussion in The Sublime Object of Ideology:
The symbolic order is striving for a homeostatic balance, but there is in its kernel, at its very centre, some strange traumatic element which cannot be symbolized, integrated in the symbolic order—the Thing. Lacan coined a neologism for it: L’extimité—external intimacy . . . The very existence of the symbolic order implies a possibility of its radical effacement, of ‘symbolic death’—not the death of the so-called ‘real object’ in its symbol, but the obliteration of the signifying network itself. (my emphasis)17
Žižek’s interpretation of Lacan supplements Lacoue-Labarthe’s because Žižek does not just supply the philosophical content of the real as a hole in the symbolic order; he also focuses on this element of lack as traumatic, which might shatter the whole of the symbolic network. Lacoue-Labarthe would most likely agree with Žižek, since the reading of the ‘Thing’ as the evil (will to) power of ‘destruction’ and ‘extermination’ culminates for Lacoue-Labarthe in the ‘technique of death’ (119), and by this he means to suggest the horror of the West that extends from colonialism to the horror of the Holocaust (on which he never ceased to meditate) and beyond.18 But it is nonetheless a matter of making the traumatic real (the horror) explicit. Kurtz is thus the name that wounds and fissures the symbolic order of which Marlow is a member. Kurtz’s perversion of the law (in the imperative to ‘exterminate!’) and his obscene enjoyment disrupt the colonial symbolic attempt to legitimate an idealized ‘We’. Kurtz is the name of a wound, a shock. Marlow tells us when he is waiting for Kurtz to die and for a moment finds him missing: ‘What made this emotion so overpowering was—how shall I define it?—the moral shock I received, as if something altogether monstrous, intolerable to thought and odious to the soul, had been thrust upon me unexpectedly’ (141) – as if recovery of Kurtz’s physical body might keep the spectre of missing meaning (the symbolic death) out of sight.
And in this way Kurtz becomes Marlow’s dangerous/traumatic object. In Marlow’s telling, the sense of Kurtz (i.e. his own ability to make Kurtz meaningful) exists primarily at the level of a ‘dream-sensation’ (82; my emphasis): ‘Do you see him [Kurtz]? Do you see the story? . . . It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream . . . convey the dream sensation’ (82). And again: it is a feeling of ‘being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams’ (82), of being held by a tangle of emotions not yet translated or processed in thought.19 Lacoue-Labarthe refers to ‘all those who are fascinated by him [Kurtz]’ (116) and, of course, Marlow admits of being among them as he says: ‘Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated’ (149). In his foundational ‘intimacy’ with Kurtz (143), however, Marlow isn’t just fascinated by him. He suffers radically conflicting emotions: he veers between attraction and revulsion, idealization and despair, anxiety and punishment. He stands mute before the enormity of Kurtz’s degradation. There are no words in Marlow’s belief system to make sense of Kurtz’s self-worship and terror, no words for Marlow’s own complicity in imperialist atrocity. The collapse of Marlow’s (illusion of) moral integrity correlates with Kurtz’s disintegration, threatening Marlow with self-collapse, with following Kurtz into a ‘muddy hole’ (150). Marlow holds himself in a suspended relation to the dangerous object until that suspension itself breaks down into melancholia. The only real alternative to disease is a correct identification of what Kurtz represents and that, for Marlow, is unbearable: the loss of subjective integrity and ethical community.
The assertion of melancholia
I have already suggested the ways in which Heart of Darkness is a critical myth for Lacoue-Labarthe, that this myth shows how terrible colonial domination is the expression of the West as absolute Subject, or, in his words, ‘what the West is [is known]through what the West does (“to others”)’ (118). Lacoue-Labarthe thereby implies that, for Conrad or, at least, as the novella represents it, what the West is – namely, its political identity – is also, in Debra Berghoffen words, a ‘non-ethical We’.20 This dark vision of the socius is precisely what Marlow cannot accept and suffers as an extreme threat. He is in-between: he cannot accept mimetic identification with, or interpellation by, the virtuous colonial Subject (in the General Manager’s words, ‘the gang of virtue’ [79]), but he cannot accept a place in a new, non-ethical We either.
In Lacoue-Labarthe’s argument, there is ‘the long work of mourning which . . . governs Marlow’s narrative’ (114–15), presumably mourning for what Kurtz’s colonial political subjectivity is, and what it does to others. Lacoue-Labarthe also focuses on how the world beyond the West, which is scattered with the West’s victims, is caught up in the work of mourning too. ‘[S]uch is the gloom it [the West] imposes on the whole world: pain, sadness, an endless lament, a mourning that no work will ever diminish’ (119). This vision is doubtlessly compelling, and yet the idea of the destructiveness of the West leading to mourning as a permanent feature of global culture moves beyond what is said in Heart of Darkness. For, the lamenting natives whom Marlow hears, as his steamboat moves closer to Kurtz, aren’t grieving because of the destruction Kurtz has brought down on them, but because they believe that Marlow is going to take Kurtz from them. They attack Marlow’s boat to prevent Kurtz from leaving. Marlow asks Kurtz’s follower, the harlequin, ‘Why did they attack us?’ and the harlequin responds, ‘They don’t want him to go’ (124–5). Moreover, at the time of Kurtz’s death, when Marlow hears the ‘droning sound of many men chanting’, he tell us that Mr Kurtz’s adorers were keeping their ‘uneasy vigil’ (140), that is to say, they mourn for Kurtz himself, not for the injuries they have suffered under his reign. When Marlow first hears the natives’ mournful wail, he also thinks of himself, how he has possibly missed his chance to hear Kurtz, and he compares ‘the startling extravagance of emotion’ he has felt with ‘the howling sorrow of these savages’ (114). But that ‘distant kinship’ in sorrow is too distant for Marlow to recognize in the natives’s howling loss, his own civilized loss: Kurtz’s effective destruction of Marlow’s world. Marlow’s resonance with the howling savages is, at best, a missed opportunity for working through his own howling loss, and at worst, his colonial, racist projection or use of the ‘simple people’ (without distance from emotions) as a receptacle for evacuating ‘extravagant’ feelings that would otherwise threaten the self.
Lacoue-Labarthe’s focus on the global effects of Western power tells us more about him than about Conrad. And Lacoue-Labarthe is able to mourn in ways that Marlow’s narration shows that Marlow (and perhaps Conrad too) is not. Mourning asks us to do what we do not want to do – namely, to give up a love object or a libidinally invested position and to find a substitute for it. As Peter Homans describes it, in cultural mourning the breach is healed by means of an introspective reinterpretation of one’s cultural ethos. If the substitute for lost culture is reinvented culture, there must be something in the cultural ethos that is worth reworking. But by Lacoue-Labarthe’s interpretative lights, there really isn’t much in the culture of domination to rework – it must be disrupted and undone. Perhaps the only valid substitute is the registration of the real. Isn’t this what Lacoue-Labarthe’s Conrad, the philosophic novelist, does? But in my view, uncompromised truth-telling probably isn’t the most likely form of telling for an author in the throes of a crisis in imperialism and whose narrator is seized by that trauma. We do well to be mindful of what Julia Kristeva has observed: ‘The periods that witness the downfall of political and religious idols, periods of crisis, are particularly favorable to black moods. While it is true that an unemployed worker is less suicidal than a deserted lover, melancholia does assert itself in times of crisis; it is spoken of, establishes its archeology, generates its representations and its knowledge’.21 Heart of Darkness is one text in the long twentieth-century’s archive of melancholy writing.
Marlow provides his desolate memory about almost missing the chance to experience ‘the real presence’ of Kurtz’s voice. He says:
I was cut to quick at the idea of having lost the inestimable privilege of listening to the gifted Kurtz. Of course I was wrong. . . . A voice. He was little more than a voice. And I heard him—it—this voice—other voices—all of them were so little more than voices—and the memory of that time itself lingers around me, impalpable, like a dying vibration of one immense jabber, silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or simply mean, without any kind of sense. (114–15)
The phrase, ‘the memory of that time lingers around me . . . mean, without any kind of sense’, expresses the disillusioning loss of Kurtz’s ‘real presence’. One also senses anger with ‘this voice—other voices—all of them were so little more than voices’, a corollary of Marlow’s sense of betrayal at being ‘robbed of a belief’ (114). Marlow wanted Kurtz to mirror back to him an idealized image – the ‘real presence’ of a voice filled with the power of shared beliefs – and thereby establish a mirroring rapport. But Marlow now experiences the collapse of that ideal (‘I was wrong’) in terms of betrayal and desolation. Kurtz has failed him. In this terrible deceleration from an illusion of rapport to a conviction of utter senselessness, Marlow substitutes anger and despair for mourning and a gradual acceptance of loss.
The ‘sadder but wiser’ tonalities that are part of working through disillusionment are not part of Marlow’s experience (and re-experience in the narrative dream) of Kurtz. Anger and senselessness follow each other in a futile round: Marlow is enraged by the absurdity of his experience of Kurtz and of all the other imperialist voices, but rage impedes his ability to make meaning, to allow for both reality and possibility. And if his angry devaluation of the clamouring voices gets in the way of sense and the avowal of loss, then hatred becomes a position of protest. But hatred for the betrayer (a craving to destroy what destroys) arouses feelings of guilt, and guilt is only alleviated by masochistic inversion or yet another resurrection of the narcissistic ideal. This is Marlow’s melancholia, his psychological movement between the redemptive Kurtz who held the promise of light in darkness and the despair-laden Kurtz who spoke no sense and razed all value. It is a Freudian or, more precisely, a Kleinian paranoid-schizoid construction of the melancholy self, the deserted self, but one not willing to relinquish the ideal promise that nourishes it.22
At Kurtz’s death bed Marlow paradoxically transfers meaning to the very place where it is lost (i.e. in Kurtz’s emptiness) and makes an exorbitant bid for the survival of idealization. Marlow’s account begins with ‘Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated’. That is, it begins with his ambivalent attraction. Fascination, however, gives way to sanctification. Marlow asks:
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)
‘Did he . . . ?’ the interrogative, is transformed into, ‘I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man’ (151), the declarative. This shift in grammar and meaning occurs because Marlow is rejecting his own experience of extremity (‘And it is not my own extremity I remember best . . . No! It is his extremity that I seem to have lived through’ [151]) in favour of the powerful response to death that he finds in Kurtz. The man confronts death, with a stare that ‘was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up—he had judged. “The horror!” He was a remarkable man’ (151).
In Lacoue-Labarthe’s discussion of this textual moment, as I have already noted, he rightly asks, ‘What has [Kurtz] seen? What has he suffered? What is he talking about?’ (116). And Peter Brooks describes the exclamation (‘The horror! The horror!’) as a simple ‘cry’ of indecipherable pain, a cry that answers so poorly to a death-bed scene of settling of accounts.23 There is also a marked inconsistency between Marlow’s response in this scene and his earlier, disillusioning view of Kurtz looking into his soul: ‘his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad’ (145). The narrative of Kurtz’s end has many gaps. And the forced and false qualities of Marlow’s narration demonstrate his great need for a narcissistic antidote to depressive anxiety (feelings of guilt). In Marlow’s eyes, Kurtz has ‘complete knowledge’ and ‘all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity’ has gone into his summing up – ‘he had judged’ (151). Kurtz has become, for Marlow, almost divine. But the ‘cry, that was no more than a breadth’ (149) is only a painful sound of uncertain reference; an unsaid (non dit) that is left to stand where there should be intense recognition and even grieving words exchanged on the committed atrocities. Kurtz does not provide that in Marlow’s account, but instead provides the artifice of disowned meaning, the opacity of an ideal untenanted by guilt.
What follows next in Marlow’s account is Kurtz’s physical death and Marlow’s self-deprecating assessment of his own ordeal. The ‘manager’s boy’ announces ‘Mistah Kurtz—he dead’, and Marlow follows with ‘The voice was gone . . . I am of course aware that next day the pilgrims buried something in a muddy hole. And then they nearly buried me’ (150). Marlow’s extended rumination comes next:
I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness . . . in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary . . . And it is not my own extremity I remember best—a vision of greyness without form filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things—even of this pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I seem to have lived through. (150–1)
Why does Marlow have suicidal thoughts (‘they very nearly buried me’)? And why does he have a vision of his internal struggle as taking place in ‘greyness’ or as a ‘greyness without form’? Importantly, Marlow tells us that he seems to ‘live through’ Kurtz – that is to say, the subject-to-subject relation has collapsed. Therefore, Marlow’s struggle with death is not something apart from Kurtz’s struggle. Earlier, before the deathbed scene, Marlow and Kurtz spent long hours arguing. Or, in effect, Marlow struggled with Kurtz as an adversary: ‘If anybody had ever struggled with a soul, I am the man. And I wasn’t arguing with a lunatic either’ (144). Is Marlow not expressing a psychically internalized struggle with Kurtz? And is Marlow’s wrestle ‘with death’ not actually a deadly struggle with this internalized adversary? Marlow literally takes Kurtz’s fury into himself and punishes himself. And does he not lock up that danger in himself rather than admit to any endangering colonial wrongdoing of his own?
Marlow destroys the worth of his own experience. He knows only ‘a sickly tepid scepticism’, and he feels only disdain for his ‘physical [and mental] pain’, ‘a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things—even of this pain itself’ (151). The boundary between self and other collapses in deprecation as the other’s anger is installed in the self. On the one hand, ‘the greyness’ represents the depressive denial of the painful and insufferable connection to Kurtz, an inhibition that allows Marlow to survive, yet leaves him absent from himself. On the other hand, beyond this fog of dejection is the prospect of following Kurtz into death. Suicidal thoughts derive either from Marlow’s ‘loyalty’ to his ideal (a negative narcissistic merging) or as self-punishment for the unavowed ‘sins’ that belong to him as colonial citizen. This is how melancholia asserts itself, in omnipotent illusions of repair, in destruction and in self-destruction, the frightening motives that surface in times of crisis, when loss and bereavement have been repudiated.
For Marlow, these crippling affective intensities happen, but no one bears testimony to them; he most simply endures and his listeners do not want to be affected. We see this clearly when Marlow starts to tell about his disappointment at the prospect of missing out on the privilege of hearing Kurtz’s voice; his audience becomes restless and sighs with impatience. Marlow infers that someone has called him ‘absurd’. He retorts: ‘Why do you sigh in this beastly way, somebody? Absurd? Well, absurd. Good lord! Mustn’t a man ever—’ (114). It is as if the men on the Nellie were saying, ‘Marlow, you know that We don’t talk about feelings’. Marlow’s jungle experience overwhelms and makes him incoherent. On the one hand, he is captive to his perceptual memories; on the other hand, emotions sweep over him, but there is no subject integrating the emotions with the perceptions, no subject to make sense in order to mourn. Marlow cannot do this by himself, and his listeners do not help him with representing his ‘dream-sensations’. There is no one, not Marlow, not his listeners, to address his condition of ‘non-addressedness’.24 After leaving Africa, Marlow admits to extreme self-dispossession, a ‘passage through some inconceivable world [with] . . . no hope in it and no desire’ (152), and tragically, he suffers perdurable isolation: ‘We live, as we dream—alone . . . .’ (82).
Lacoue-Labarthe tells us that Western ‘barbarity’ consists in not wanting to know the truth, and he focuses on emotion only as an expedient in a cover up. As he puts it, Marlow has his
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. (119–20)
Lacoue-Labarthe foregrounds Marlow’s ‘will’ – his egoic agency – but the issue for the survivor of trauma is crippling pre-egoic affect, from which, necessarily, subjective incapacity follows. For Lacoue-Labarthe, Marlow is the artist, the artificer of the lie and the subject in control. The disguise of the lie works hand-in-glove with the way in which Marlow lets love do the work. From the standpoint of a psychoanalysis of affect, Lacoue-Labarthe errs by attributing agency where there is incapacity and confusing artifice with a prophylactic measure against despair.
As we look at Heart of Darkness from the perspective of the present, mindful of the twentieth (now inclusive of the twenty-first) century of Western-made disasters, we discover several truisms that are nevertheless true. The differend between a philosophy and a psychoanalysis of affect brings these axioms to light. Lacoue-Labarthe is utterly right that (Heart of Darkness shows us) the Western exercise of hegemonic power has been a ‘giddy’ destruction and that we do not want to know about it. But the West also produces traumatized subjects as a consequence of that domination. Sometimes, more often than we care to admit, we have been able to hear the truth, and still we shun the trauma. It continues to be an imperative to create communal space for affectively working through such a traumatic truth for the self. At the same time, in the mourning process, it must be acknowledged that the traumatized within our own ranks have done our Western work of oppression. What rightfully substitutes for untenable, lost goodness are the ethical connections we make to those we have oppressed: we must share their narratives. And if the truth of our history recurs (the destructive horror of the West), there is the event in that history, always singular and different – no more so than for those who are subject to it and are potentially traumatized by it. Heart of Darkness is one of the greatest texts of Western literature because of its fundamental heterogeneity. It is a text that opens profoundly, in both the idioms of philosophy and analytic theory, and tells a meaningful truth of our history; it is also a melancholic response to crisis, an insistence on the trauma of horror for those who have the ears to hear it.
Notes
1 Vincent Descombes succinctly defines Lyotard’s differend as ‘a disagreement between claims voiced in heterogeneous idioms (idioms that are “incommensurable” in Thomas Kuhn’s sense of the word), a disagreement that is in some ways insurmountable’. Vincent Descombes, The Barometer of Modern Reason: On the Philosophies of Current Events, trans. Adam Schwartz (London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 135.
2 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Emma: Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis’, in Lyotard, Philosophy, Politics, and the Sublime, ed. Hugh J. Silverman (London, New York: Routledge, 2003), 24.
3 Claire Nouvet, ‘The Inarticulate Affect: Lyotard and Psychoanalytic Testimony’, in Discourse 25.1–2 (2003): 231–47, 232.
4 See André Green, ‘Conceptions of Affect’, in International Journal of Psychoanalysis 58 (1977), where he writes that Lacan has ‘amputated affect from the theoretical corpus of psychoanalysis’, 799. See also Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Title of the Letter (1973), trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany, NY: State University of New York press, 1992), where they deconstruct Lacan’s philosophical revision of the psychoanalytic subject, and thus demonstrate that Lacan’s thought is a final sublation of philosophy.
5 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Nazi Myth’, trans. Brian Holmes, in Critical Inquiry, 16.2 (1990): 291–312, 294.
6 Although Lacoue-Labarthe mostly discusses Marlow in formal terms, he does comment that the death of Kurtz, directs Marlow’s narrative to a ‘long work of mourning’ (114), a point to which I shall return.
7 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘Typography’ (1975) in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. and trans. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1989), 132.
8 Hillis Miller, Prologue to this volume, 30.
9 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 9.
10 Simon Sparks, ‘Introduction: Politica Ficta’, in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-LucNancy, Retreating The Political (1981), ed. and trans. Simon Sparks (London, New York: Routledge, 1997), xiii–xxvi, xxiv.
11 Sparks, ‘Introduction’, xxi.
12 Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, Retreating, 153.
13 Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, ‘The Nazi Myth’, 297.
14 Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, ‘The Nazi Myth’, 297.
15 Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, ‘Scène’, 74, quoted by Simon Sparks in ‘Introduction: Politic Ficta’, xxii.
16 Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (London, New York: Routledge, 2001), 8.
17 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London, New York, Verso, 1989), 133.
18 I want to thank Nidesh Lawtoo for his observation that Lacoue-Labarthe would substantially agree with Žižek on this point.
19 My understanding of trauma is broadly psychoanalytic, that is, an overwhelming event that requires the creation of a ‘trauma narrative’ and only then can be grieved. See specifically, Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Harper Collins, 1992). For a comprehensive discussion of trauma in psychoanalytic thought informed by Lacoue-Labarthe’s work, see also Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2000).
20 Debra B. Berghoffen, ‘Interrupting Lyotard: Whither the We?’ in Lyotard, Philosophy, Politics, and the Sublime, ed. Hugh J. Silverman (London, New York: Routledge, 2003), 134.
21 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1987), trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1989), 8.
22 See Melanie Klein, ‘A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’(1935), in Contributions to Psychoanalysis, 1921–45 (London: Hogarth Press), 282, 311. Thomas Ogden’s revisions of Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position are also relevant. See Thomas Ogden, The Primitive Edge of Experience (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1989), 9–47.
23 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Random House, 1985), 250.
24 Non-addressedness is the word Nouvet uses in her reading of Lyotard’s ‘Emma’, see 233.