SOME PLAIN READING: MARLOW’S LIE IN HEART OF DARKNESS

Thumboo, E. “Some Plain Reading: Marlow's lie in Heart of Darkness”. Literary Criterion. xvi, no.3, 1981: 12-22.

SOME PLAIN READING: MARLOW’S LIE IN HEART OF DARKNESS

Edwin Thumboo
National University of Singapore

When we first read it, Conrad’s protest, that the final episode in Heart of Darkness is structurally important, intrigues rather than clarifies

……the writing is as good as I can make it (first duty), and in the light of the final incident, the whole story in all its descriptive detail shall fall into its place — acquire its value and its significance. This is my method based on deliberate conviction. I’ve never departed from it. I call your own kind self to witness and I beg to instance Karian — Lord Jim (where the method is fully developed) — the last pages of Heart of Darkness where the interview of the man and the girl locks in — as it were — the whole 30,000 words of narrative description into one suggestive view of a whole phase of life, and makes of that story something quite on another plane than an anecdote of a man who went mad in the Centre of Africa.1

Admittedly, the episode is crucial — for reasons proposed later — but despite its retrospective force it hardly raises the whole narrative on the sudden.2 By the time Marlow moves down the Congo, major overtones of character and theme are already worked into that stylistic reflex and reach Conrad sought.3 Moreover, his journey to the inner station completes in an important sense the main event of the novel. For the raw phase of Marlow’s experience is substantially over before Kurtz’s death, though it seems equally clear that his peep into the heart of darkness will continue to exert a profound influence.

The episode has generally been inspected within contexts of broader excursions into the novel’s themes. Marlow’s lie does offer a convenient focal point, one readily seized upon and confidently related to earlier episodes. To a qualified extent this is almost inevitable as Marlow’s behaviour on the occasion when he reluctantly promised the Russian to preserve Kurtz’s reputation, his subsequent references to it, are intrinsic to estimates of his experience and conceptions of his character. But such approaches while generally advancing our understanding, take the final episode at some remove from those strands of causal evidence in the narrative most likely to draw attention to its full significance. For instance the tensions hedging Marlow during the interview, are not always given due weight, tensions constituting a nightmarish experience which, allowing for differences, affect him as closely as the Congo journey. There Marlow had been drawn into the drama, compelled to expand his speculations, induced to bring them to bear on the deeper levels of Kurtz’s tragedy. He was obviously moved, but could not have suffered in the same fashion the crucial inner disturbances brought on by that choice of nightmares he faced. In the interview, he becomes the focus of pressures carrying distressing moral implications.

The final episode has organic links with the earlier narrative. But as I hope to show, its exegetical suggestiveness relates mainly to the further shaping of Marlow’s character by forcefully reiterating the ‘notion of something lived through and remembered’.4 Marlow — convalescent in body, wounded in imagination — still feels vividly his recent expedition. Kurtz continues to dominate: letters and a portrait remain to be returned. But it soon emerges that the crux of the episode is none other than the preservation of Kurtz’s reputation, an understanding whose full impact Marlow fails to anticipate in any significant degree. Mainly on account of it, his interview with the Intended turns into a final, painful lesson in which rapidly changing circumstances sharply define an extreme moral problem for him: should he or should he not lie to her? This is the nub of his predicament.

Various explanations have been advanced for Marlow’s lie. Almost all commentators on Heart of Darkness who do not dispute the importance of the final episode have had something to say on Marlow’s lie.5 But one other reason — his promise made to the Russian-antedates whatever else we make of Marlow’s motives and commitments at this point. In the exchange between him and the Manager, after they have found Kurtz, his sympathy for Kurtz, though nascent, can hardly escape our notice. He judges the Manager’s dislike of Kurtz despicable. The confrontation, as we ought to expect, generates ‘an intolerable weight oppressing my breast, the smell of the damp earth, the unseen presence of victorious corruption, the darkness of an impenetrable night……’ (p. 63). Soon after the Russian — a character totally unlike the Manager — seeks Marlow’s promise to preserve Kurtz’s reputation.

‘I don’t want any harm to happen to these whites here, but of course I was thinking of Mr. Kurtz’s reputation — but you are a brother seaman and — ’ ‘All right,’ said I, after a time. ‘Mr. Kurtz’s reputation is safe with me.

I did not know how truly I spoke…..

‘It would be awful for his reputation if anybody here —’

I promised a complete discretion with great gravity. (p. 64).

At this juncture Marlow assesses himself to be ‘Mr. Kurtz’s friend — in a way’ (p. 64). But he promises, partly on account of a growing kinship with Kurtz, partly out of disgust for the Manager. He notes in retrospect the connection between this promise and his lie to the intended adding, with the keen sense of something fated, that he had undertaken more than he knew. That very night brings the first test. Marlow wakes up shortly after midnight, recalling the Russian’s hint that the natives may attack to repossess Kurtz. He observes the big fire on the hill, the picket guarding the ivory, the monotonous drumming and chanting, the sum of which cast ‘a strange narcotic effect’ on his ‘half-awake senses’, causing him to doze off as he leans over the rails, ‘till an abrupt burst of yells, an overwhelming outbreak of a pent-up and mysterious frenzy’ woke him ‘in a bewildered wonder’ (p. 65). The possibility of danger rapidly checks his agitation at finding Kurtz missing. Marlow leaps ashore but notwithstanding the excitement remembers to ensure that Kurtz’s absence is not betrayed to the pilgrims: ‘I did not betray Mr. Kurtz — it was ordered I should never betray him — it was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.’ (pp. 65-66). That Marlow recalls the promise subsequently cannot be over-stressed. They occur at critical moments of the narration — as when he speculates about the fatefulness of his Congo journey — and the instances of recall gradually coalesce with his overall attitude to Kurtz. For the promise strengthens in the interim through Marlow’s enlarging understanding of Kurtz, the high point of which is his insight into the latter’s final words.

The redemption of the promise takes place in the final episode, in circumstances that exert their own pressures. Before the visit with the Intended, Marlow fends off menacing efforts to obtain Kurtz’s ‘documents’ and information of commercial value he was thought to have accumulated. These sinister overtures when taken with fresh disclosures about Kurtz’s talent and potential — musician, journalist, painter, political leader — add to his disturbing presence. The visit exhibits Marlow’s usual complexity of motives: curiosity, a gesture that sought qualified release from the close contact with Kurtz: ‘Perhaps it was an impulse of unconscious loyalty; or the fulfilment of one of those ironic necessities that lurk in the facts of human existence. I don’t know. I can’t tell. But I went.’ (p. 74). It is, we feel, a further accounting with Kurtz, a self- compelling expression of that process of accommodating the experience he represents; ‘I laid the ghost of his gifts at last with a lie.’ (p. 49).

Marlow is intensely conscious of Kurtz as he enters the house of the Intended:

He lived then before me; he lived as much as he had ever lived — a shadow insatiable of splendid appearances, of frightful realities…… The vision seemed to enter the house with me…… 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. And the memory of what I had heard him say afar there, with the horned shapes stirring at my back, in the glow of fires, within the patient woods, those broken phrases came back to me, were heard again in their ominous and terrifying simplicity. (pp. 74-75).

Marlow labours against the potency of this vision. The darkness that had triumphed over Kurtz, has to be frustrated for the salvation of another soul. While himself able to resist, he cannot be certain that Kurtz’s Intended would survive as despite the impression of her ‘mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering’ he observes when shaking her hand that ‘a look of awful desolation came upon her face’ (p. 76).

To judge from both the tensed dialogue and how it implicitly reaches back into the earlier narrative, it is patent that Conrad wanted his readers to be especially attentive, holding their insights into theme and character ready at the tip of their understanding. We quickly note that there are two views of Kurtz — Marlow’s, painful, recent arid complete; the Intended’s distant, idealised and partial. Marlow steeped in recent memories and images, is deeply shocked by the disparity between the Kurtz he knew and the Kurtz preserved by the Intended.

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. Do you understand? I saw them together — I heard them together. She had said, with a deep catch of the breath, ‘I have survived’; while my strained ears seemed to hear distinctly, mingled with her tone of despairing regret, the summing-up whisper of his eternal condemnation. I asked myself what I was doing there with a sensation of panic in my heart as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold (p. 76).

Marlow has no way out. In these circumstances it would be perverse to treat him as if he were a free agent, one capable of acting consistently under some moral injunction, of choosing a course according to absolute notions of right and wrong. It will be further apparent from passages quoted below that approaches to the episode of the why-does-Marlow-lie-type not only assume his freedom of action unjustly, but for that reason, prove incautious unless qualified by an awareness of his dilemma.

Behind the exchanges — they almost constitute an involuntary inquisition — move tensions and ambiguities that emerge, on the level of theme as irony, on the level of plot as a reminder of how much Marlow has taken to heart the lessons of his Congo experience. His attempts to disclose the truth tactfully are forced aside by the persistent, idealistic picture of Kurtz which informs what the Intended says. The drift of her conversation rapidly destroys any hope he may have had of putting her right:

‘And you admired him,’ she said. ‘It was impossible to know him and not admire him. Was it?’

‘He was a remarkable man,’ I said unsteadily.

Then before the appealing fixity of her gaze, that seemed to watch for more words on my lips, I went on, ‘It was impossible not to —’

‘Love him,’ she finished eagerly, silencing me into an appalled dumbness. ‘How true! how true! But when you think that no one knew him so well as I! I had all his noble confidence. I knew him best.’

‘You knew him best,’ I repeated. And perhaps she did. But with every word spoken the room was growing darker, and only her forehead, smooth and white, remained illumined by the inextinguishable light of belief and love...

…… And the girl talked, easing her pain in the certitude of my sympathy; she talked as thirsty men drink……

… ‘But you have heard him! You know!’ she cried.

‘Yes, I know,’ I said with something like despair in my heart, but bowing my head before the faith that was in her, before that great and saving illusion that shone with an unearthly glow in the darkness, in the triumphant darkness from which I could not have defended her — from which I could not even defend myself. (pp. 76-77).

The Intended is anxious for confirmation that would presumably refurnish those memories which provide her comfort and security. And she herself supplies the confirmation by interrupting Marlow’s answers to complete them with what she wants to hear. Marlow tries desperately to steer a middle course. His answers — ‘We shall always remember him.’ ‘His words will remain,’ ‘‘His end,’ said I, with dull anger stirring in me,’ ‘was in every way worthy of his life.’ (p. 78) — are either incomplete or deliberately ambiguous, allowing a semblance of fidelity to his vision, the more complete one. But clearly the initiative is not his; it never was. The very structure of the dialogue emphasises the mounting tension and the anger he suffers are but the lesser agents of his inner conflict: ‘My anger subsided before a feeling of infinite pity.’ ‘I felt like a chill grip on my chest,’ ‘I said shakily,’ ‘I stopped in a fright’ (p. 78). Her need is greater than his; she exercises his options

‘I was on the point of crying at her, “Don’t you hear them?’’ The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. “The horror!” “The horror!“

‘His last word — to live with,’ she insisted. ‘ Don’t you understand I loved him — I loved him — I loved him !‘

‘The last word he pronounced was—your name.’ (p. 79)

Marlow promised to preserve Kurtz’s reputation; he hardly has a choice. The lie is forced upon him.6

To consider the lie in this context discourages passing easy judgement on Marlow. Thomas Moser’s contention that Marlow stands guilty of self-betrayal — ‘he has made truth seem too important throughout the novel to persuade the reader now to accept falsehood as salvation ‘— or that the lie weakens the final episode is over-harsh. It does not accord with the drama, tension and drift shaping the episode. This itself should put us on guard against a judgement too firmly held, especially one that can at times lead to interpretative constructs which restrict rather than open up the text. It is pushing too far — further than Conrad can safely be alleged to intend — to assert that ‘The scene can also be read as Marlow’s reaffirmation of fellowship with Kurtz. To accept Kurtz’s pronouncement, ‘ “The horror”, means accepting damnation; Marlow’s sin, the lie, serves to confirm this.’7 Such a conclusion borders on the doctrinaire.

It ignores Marlow’s detachment which governs his sympathy for Kurtz. Further, by aligning his progress so closely with Kurtz’s final moments we undervalue that reflection and comment on events and their implications which between them argue solidly for Marlow’s ultimate standing as a full and independent character. To see him as less would be unjust.

Conrad’s remarks quoted at the beginning very likely refer to Marlow’s final lesson which supplies that larger meaning to the novel, thereby differentiating it from an ‘anecdote of a man who went mad in the Centre of Africa’. While Kurtz provides the provocation, our interest derives in the main from what happens to Marlow.8 As he proceeds on his journey his judgement grows more inward, tempered by a robust appreciation of the needs of others, and a realisation that conflicting claims can be imposed by circumstances not of our making. It underpins his attitude to Kurtz fostering a sympathetic contact, one neither fragile nor indulgent. The range of his discriminations is obvious in the considered summing up of Kurtz as a remarkable man, a judgement less severe than the occasional critic’s.John S. Whitley, Golding: Lord of the Flies, Edward Arnold, London, 1970, P. 17; see also Bernard S. Oldsey and Stanley Weintraub, The Art of William Golding, Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., New York, 1965, pp. 17-19.9 We fail at times to remember that Marlow himself is a remarkable figure; he retrieves the essential history of a soul whose promises and disasters are archetypal, touching especially on those darker impulses — not always easy of access — we all share but whose operations are not always felt consciously or understood too late

But as Marlow re-creates the history of Kurtz in a shape that stresses its lessons, we tend to overlook efforts on behalf of his own powers of survival which are manifest early in the novel. A plethora of startling impressions crowd upon him but he remains basically secure. The interview with the ‘great man’ in the ‘whited sepulchre ‘, the sinister impression left by the two women knitting (pp. 9-10) initiate his capacity to resolve the impact of gesture, event or scene into verbal patterns that establish their wider meaning. He is curious yet cautious from the start; introspection causes him to examine and digest, a process vague and tentative at first, but which firms up with, each fresh contact. A vivid, penetrating imagination protects him from being drawn fatally into what it encounters by this very capacity to perceive and place the underlying, ultimate threat they pose:

There it is before you — smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, Come and find out. (p. 13)

Awareness of this kind enables him to respond without being overwhelmed. Unlike Kurtz, he recognises the overpowering mastery of the place; it takes him in, but his identifying self does not buckle; the savage energy of place its correlatives, are held down. Even before he reached Kurtz or had heard about him, Marlow’s speculative observation works to provide useful immunity:

Perhaps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive, and wild — and perhaps with as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country. (p. 20)

This discriminatory power, so necessary to Marlow’s grip on things, amplifies as he enters the heart of darkness, remains constantly alert, irrespective of whether the pressures encountered are obvious or not. Marlow’s description of the journey up the Congo, while admitting a lush fertility (luxurious growth, sunshine, etc.) identifies the menace: ‘This stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention’ (p. 34). These cumulative insights become Marlow’s guardians, enabling him to move from observation to judgement.

Unlike the Russian who was protected by a pure but narrow idealism, Marlow’s self-preservation is a complex affair. It is built up as he moves into and out of the heart of darkness, simultaneously with his ethical and moral discriminations. There are grounds for treating with suspicion the claim that M proceeds no further than participate in Kurtz’s self-revelation. Kurtz’s self-realisation is the gift of his final moments. The text does not suggest any impression of sustained contrition or of gradual restoration. Whatever the extent Marlow finds himself taken into Kurtz’s experiences, his mind never relinquishes control, for Kurtz’s history is precisely a consequence he avoids Recognition of this effort is central to a reading of the Heart of Darkness. The energies supporting and extending Marlow’s understanding remain his alone. What lessons there are in this history are drawn up by Marlow, in whose observations, reflections etc. inheres the pattern of themes we find in the novel. To see him as doing less is to deny his true stature, and to miss the prime significance of Conrad’s remarks. For in the final episode he learns what it means — and costs — to protect a fellow human being.

1	William Blackburn, ed., Joseph Conrad: Letters to William Blackwood and David S. Meldrum (North Carolina, 1958), P. 154.
2	Doubts about the importance of the final episode have been expressed for example by Wilfred S. Dowden, ‘The Light and the Dark Imagery and Thematic Development in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”, Rice Institute Pamphlet, XLIV (April 1957), 48-51; F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (London 1955), pp. 181-182; Douglas Brown, ‘From Heart of Darkness to Nostromo: An Approach to Conrad’, The Modern Age, ed. Boris Ford (Harmondsworth, 1961), pp. 136-137 and Marvin Mudrick, ‘The Originality of Conrad’, The Hudson Review, Vol. XI, No. 4, (Winter 1958-59), pp. 551-552.
3	The two relevant passages on technique are in the ‘Author’s Note’, Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether (Dent: London, 1967), p. vii and Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York, 1963), p.5. All quotations are from the latter edition, with page references given in parenthesis. Italics are mine.
4	Letters, ed. Blackburn, p. 55.
5	See for example Lillian Feder,’ Marlow’s Descent into Hell’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, Vol. 9 (March, 1955), pp. 280.292, Kenneth Bernard ‘Marlow’s Lie’, The English Record (April 1963), pp. 47-48, Kenneth A. Bruffee ‘The Lesser Nightmare: Marlow’s Lie in “Heart of Darkness”’, Modern Language Quarterly Vol. 25 (Spring 1964), pp. 322.329 Ted. E. Boyle, ‘Marlow’s “Lie” in “Heart of Darkness” ’, Studies in Short Fiction, Vol.1, No.2 (Winter, 1964), PP 159.163 Ralph Maud ‘The Plain Tale of “Heart of Darkness” ’, Humanities Association Bulletin, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Autumn, 1966), pp. 13-17. John W. Canario, ‘The Harlequin in “Heart of Darkness” ’, Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Spring, 1967), pp. 225.233, Frederick R. Karl ‘Introduction to the Danse Macabre: Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” ’, Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Summer, 1968), pp. 143.156, Gerald B. Kauvar ‘Marlow As Liar’, Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Spring, 1968), pp. 290.292, and Bruce Johnson ‘Names, Naming, and the “Inscrutable” in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” ’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language Vol. 12, No. 4 (Winter, 1971), pp. 675-688. The trend of criticism suggests increasingly the complex explication of the ‘meaning’ of ‘Heart of Darkness’ within which Marlow’s lie is viewed—
6	Yet we find Marlow described as unfeeling: ‘He called on Kurtz’s “Intended” and gave her a bundle of letters. She seemed so unreal too, and her sorrow so irrelevant, that Marlow had no compunction about telling her a lie: that the last word Kurtz pronounced in life was her name.’ Osborn Andreas, Joseph Conrad: A Study in Non-conformity (New York, 1959), p. 53.
7	Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 79, 81. See also Leonard F. Dean, ‘Tragic Pattern in “Conrad’s Heart of Darkness “, College English, VI (Nov. 1944), pp. 100-104, for another account open to similar objections.
8	Frederick R. Karl, A Reader’s Guide to Joseph Conrad (London, 1960), p. 34 mistakes the emphasis of the novel when he writes that Kurtz’s ‘loss of human responsibility is the centre of the work’. If we insist on locating one, it is arguably Marlow’s acquisition of humanity.
9	For example Joseph Warrant Beach, The Twentieth Century Novel (New York 1932), p. 340 and Obsessive Images (Minneapolis, 1960), p. 43.