Deconstructing Marlowe: Character and Narrative Instability in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a novella greatly occupied with the nature of narrative and story-telling, with itself as narrative, and with itself as text. This interest is manifested from the beginning in its very structure as a frame story – quite literally a story about the telling of a story. Furthermore, the frame narrator (meta-narrator) informs us, early in his description of Marlowe (the narrated storyteller), that Marlowe seeks meaning in a story not “within the shell of a cracked nut … inside, like a kernel,” but, rather, “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” (2306).
This formula of narrative attributed to Marlowe accomplishes a number of things. First, it reinforces the idea of the text’s self-reflexivity, presenting us with a hierarchical binary – that of inside/outside – and subverting it, granting priority to the “outside” of the story proper, the telling of the story rather than the story itself. In this the text is setting up an idea of the “narrativity of narrative,” so to speak, inviting the reader to consider the text as a structure, and not simply a story.
Secondly, this narrative formula aligns Marlowe with the tradition of Western thought regarding structure: just as Marlowe finds the meaning of a story in everything surrounding the story (and thus within the story as well – one cannot have an outside without an inside), so also does classical thought on structure claim, as Jacques Derrida formulates in his essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” that “the center [of the structure] is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it” (279).
Considering that this interest in language and communication overshadows the entire novella, it comes as no surprise that, toward the end of Part One, Marlowe breaks from his narrative to address his listeners with a reflection on this very subject. His reflection is broken up into two parts. He begins, in the first part, by considering the apparent absurdity of his task (that is, to communicate in language what had previously only existed as image):
Do you see him [Kurtz]? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams … No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. (2323)
Here we see a text turning inward on itself, examining the impossibility of its own existence, its own inability to communicate, grappling with the problem of language and uncertainty. This is reinforced in the first part of Marlowe’s reflection by his initial incessant questioning – which, appropriately, considering the story’s textual self-awareness, is in common literary usage to produce a similar effect of uneasy uncertainty: consider, for example, Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, or the opening lines of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable: “Where now? Who now? When now?”.[1]
Marlowe goes on immediately, in the second part of his musing, to delineate a speaking presence, an answer to his question: himself: “Of course in this you fellows see more than I could then. You see me, whom you know” (2323, italics mine). With this statement, Marlowe offers himself as a point of reference, an element of tangible reality by which we may measure, and to which we may anchor, his intangible words; he sets himself up, essentially, as that center – “within the structure,” in his role as primary actor, “and outside it,” in his role as storyteller – the function of which is to “orient, balance, and organize the structure,” and, above all, to “limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure” (Derrida 278). Thus Marlowe qua center seeks to preserve the meaningful structure of the system by organizing relationships between signifier and signified, almost allowing him to communicate effectively with his listeners.
To be fair to Marlowe, his claim of center-ness-through-presence puts him, in the same way as does his outside/inside narrative formula, squarely in the tradition of Western metaphysics. According once again to Derrida,
all the names related to fundamentals, to principals, or to the center have always designated the constant of a presence—eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject) aletheia [truth], transcendentality, consciousness, or conscience, God, man, and so forth. (280)
However, regardless of whether or not Marlowe is actually present to his listeners (itself a debatable point: almost immediately after this statement, the meta-narrator refers to him as “no more to us than a voice”), he is certainly not present, in any unmediated sense, to the reader. He says, like Christ to Thomas, “see me,” but, instead of offering palm to feel and side to touch, he gives us nothing but text and language – systems and structures the un-centered communicative impossibilities of which he had only just finished lamenting. But for Marlowe to operate as a center, as a transcendental signified, he must be able (by definition) to transcend, to operate externally of the structure which he purports to center, to “gover[n] the structure, while escaping structurality” (Derrida 279). And thus, in his inability to escape from language, Marlowe has reached that moment in the history of the concept of structure in which
language invaded the universal problematic; … in which, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse—provided we can agree on this word—that is to say, when everything became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside of a system of differences. (Derrida 280)
Marlowe indeed is only able to operate, in relation to the reader, within a system of linguistic difference: he is unable to utter the God-like “I AM THAT I AM”[2] necessary to center his structure, but, rather, is forced to define himself, first as presence against the absence of Kurtz (“I did not see the man”/ “You see me”), then as Self against Other (“I”/ “You”).
As Derrida notes, “the absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad infinitum” (280). And so, implicit in a deconstruction of Marlowe as the centering element in the text is this: because it is unreasonable to examine and obtain meaning from a system based on a structure entirely constructed from within itself (and therefore completely self-referential, generative of no true meaning), Heart of Darkness remains an uncertain, un-resolvable text: and insofar as it is un-centered, a fluid chain of shifting referents, it is significant of everything at once, and, at the same time, of nothing.
Notes
[1] Beckett, Samuel. Unnamable, The. Three Novels. Trans. Samuel Beckett. New York: Random House, 1965. 290-414. 129.
[2] As found in Exodus 3:14, a common English translation of the response given when Moses asks the name of God. The point, here, of course, is that this name is entirely self-referential while remaining, presumably, meaningful.
Works Cited
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Eds. M. H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2001. 2304-2363.
Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 1978. 278-294.
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