Essay About Conrads Obscurity And Thomas Mann

Heart Of Darkness White Lies
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Heart of Darkness: White Lies
Joseph Conrads slender volume Heart of Darkness, published serially in Blackwoods Magazine in
1899, has probably received more critical attention per page than any other prose work. Layer
after layer has been examined and analysed, and continually they seem to lead on to
increasingly abstract strata. Critics have demonstrated how Marlow, fundamentally unreliable
and partial in his capacity of first-person narrator, becomes involved in the action and is
gradually changed by the events he describes. Using time-shifts and varying vantage points, he
takes the puzzled readers as well as the listeners on board the Nellie along the borderlines of
consciousness and reality. Like the narrator, we are allowed to “peep over the edge” into the
dark abyss, as it were, but still the novel teases like a dream, contradictory and intriguing.
According to E. M. Forster, among others, Conrads obscurity mediates a kind of double vision
caused by discrepancies between his nearer and his further vision: “What is so elusive about
him is that he is always promising to make some general philosophic statement about the
universe, and then refraining with a gruff disclaimer” (Forster, 134-5).
The novel, concluding
with Marlows lie to the Intended, is expressive of a sense of utter disillusionment, in stark
contrast with nineteenth-century historians optimistic view of humanity continually moving
towards full understanding. In Conrads book, paradoxically, ultimate truth is expressed
through a lie. In keeping with the ambience of fin de si3cle, on psychological, social and
religious reading levels the storyline heads towards “the end” in the sense of ultimate darkness,
a condition of meaninglessness and nihilism, negating all civilized values.
Part of the puzzlement which has been felt about this story has come about as a result
of dividing it into a series of interrelated layers, and the fact that in the first half of the book
there is a predominant emphasis on the picture of colonialism, whereas in the second half we
find a concentration on the implied authors notions of existential unease and metaphysical
evil. Whether critics prefer predominantly psychological, archetypal or political
interpretations, they broadly agree that the novel is strangely “modern” in outlook and
obviously resists simple readings. Clearly, it explores characteristic Conradian themes such as
the concept of “evil” and the hazardous predicament of social isolation. It is true that Conrad
has been criticized for being vague and unclear, but it has also been argued that the notion of
evil can never be fully defined, and that the book becomes “powerful precisely to the extent
that it is not precise”; its mistiness is part of the structure and Kurtzs unspeakable rites must
necessarily “remain unspoken” (Murfin, 101, and Cox, 56). Consequently, when discussing the
notion of “white lies” in the context of Conrads novel this discussion will offer no new
varieties of psychological or religious interpretation. Instead it will focus on aspects of fin de
si3cle in the authors political, social and private background. Besides internationally wellknown
Conrad criticism I will also draw from historical source material contained in the
Swedish writer cum journalist Sven Lindqvists part documentary part autobiographical book
Utrota varenda j#vel (“Exterminate all the brutes”).
Rightly or wrongly, recent criticism has maintained that Joseph Conrad should be regarded
primarily as a political novelist. Certainly all his major novels % at least on one reading level %
concern themselves with man as a social being, involved in events and situations of a political
character. We should keep in mind that Conrads political, philosophical and moral outlook
remained essentially Slavic or Central European, not Anglo-Saxon. His themes, in other
contexts too, concern the connection between knowledge and doubt in a manner reminiscient
of Dostoevsky or Kafka, Thomas Mann or Camus, all writers of short fictions dealing with
mental dissolution, or of philosphers such as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer or, later, Wittgenstein,
preoccupied with the relationship between will power and moral and social responsibility.
Certainly he did not share G. B. Shaws optimistic “life-force” credo regarding Darwinian
evolution. Instead, to judge from his letters and diaries, he saw society as “basically criminal,”
crime as “a necessary condition of organized living,” and man as an “evil animal.” Kurtz and
Marlow both illustrate how the horror of mans life is perpetuated by lying and continuous
deception. As Thomas Brook argues, “Conrads art approaches the truth . . . not by stating it but
reminding us of the lie that accompanies every effort to name the truth”
(Brook,