THE THRESHOLD OF THE INVISIBLE SAID, CONRAD, AND IMPERIALISM Russell Ford "Writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural struggles."1 In The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle writes at length about what he calls "the systematic elusiveness of the I."2 Always one step ahead, the agent of conscious, intentional action perpetually outstrips its own grasp. He concludes his description of this phenomenon by noting that "there is no mystery about this constancy [with which the I eludes conscious grasp], but I mention it because it seems to endow 'I'with a mystifying uniqueness and adhesiveness. 'Now' has something of the same besetting feeling."3 The "now" and the "I," the moment and the agent of deliberate action, of creation, slip from an apprehension that could only ever be their reiteration. Imagine this essential frustration as Conrad penned his novella, Heart of Darkness, that now famous work whose historical contingency seems lost beneath its canonic sta tus . All of the careful ly wrought-perhaps overly-wrought-lines,4 the archetypal characters, the slow envelopment of its brooding themes-all of these elements emerged in time, out of nothing, across the space of a blank page, as ink traced out across parchment; a perpetually dislocated act of expression. Amidst the almost suffocating purposiveness of Marlow and his tale-recounted now by another-each moment, each mark imagined thus seems to hold back and refuse to decidedly yield to the fullness of the narrative. The necessity of this withholding, the indecision that marks the materiality of the written, is itself the expression of a question. In Conrad's novella, this question obtains expression through the peculiar constitution of Marlow, and specifically through the hesitations and interruptions that Marlow succumbs to in the course of the tale. "Marlow" is the name that Conrad gives to that space of narrative creation-the "now" of writing-that eludes encapsulation or semantic mastery. Marlow is an agent of syntax, of the multiplicity of interpretations birthed by the perpetually tardy bestowal of meaning, as evidenced by his implication not only within the narrative of Heart of Darkness, but also in the earlier story "Youth," and the subsequent novels Lord Jim and Chance.5 Marlow, with all of his complications, is certainly not a necessary component to the story of any of these works. One could imagine them without Marlow, related directly, perhaps, in the first person and therefore stripped of the apparently needless complication of Marlow's (and hence Conrad's) indirectness. Marlow's persistency is, therefore, a sign, perhaps a cipher, of another expression that subtends the narratives of the works that he imposes upon. As Edward Said recognizes, it is one of Conrad's chief virtues as a writer that his works are troubled by the space of the imminent catastrophe of writing, the space of the "now" within which a work of literature takes form without the writer ever being able to foresee its successful completion.6 All of the narrative displacements of Heart of Darkness bear witness to this impossibility of narrative appropriating its own determinacy. The name "Marlow" does not designate a character; it hides or masks a figure, a constellation of indissociable elements that expresses neither a subjective "I" nor an objective "now." In Marlow, Conrad gives expression to an I that is immediately invested by the non-subjective forces of worldly relations, both personal and otherwise, and to a now that takes in more than this man writing, this ink, and this paper, is added a now that includes the non-objective, historical and contingent meanings acquired by these objects and others. This expression in no way implies an intentional decision on the part of the author but rather amounts to a denial of the very possibility of such a decision. Like PHILOSOPHY TODAY WINTER 2006 463 Marlow, Conrad himself is an expression for his readers of the historically determinate world that gave shape to his writing. To try to read the truth of one from the expression of the other can only ever give rise to a circular argument; just as Marlow is generated by an act of writing that Conrad is constitutively unable to master, so Conrad is himself caught within the trajectory of a society for which he becomes an exemplary sign of the historical situation that orients but never encompasses that trajectory.7 Near the end of Culture and Imperialism Said is prospecting for a theoretical enunciation of the conceptual transformations that have proliferated at the limits formed by the trajectory of imperialist culture. Among the theorists and theories that he surveys, he finds "mysteriously suggestive" Deleuze and Guattari's reconceptualization of the subversion of the very terms of cultural struggle in the nomadic activity of the "war machine."8 The particular virtue of the war machine is its power to disarticulate and refashion the meaningful content of existing societal forms, thereby not merely challenging the dominance of these infused and formed meanings by revealing them as historical and therefore found meanings, but also implicitly subverting the societal form itself. The war machine does not constitute a new societal form that would then challenge or replace the dominant society that it resists; to do so would be to accept the definitions supplied by the inverse side of that society's culture. In order to escape the bounds of this dialectical game (whose result is only ever the reimposition of a normalizing force of society), the war machine parodies the societal form by creating illicit combinations of cultural forces and objects that are nonetheless permitted by virtue of their places of inclusion within the defining limit of a society.9 While this parody is lived by exiles, refugees, and migrants-whose numbers, Said notes with regret, have only continued to increase-its effect of "deterritorialization," its ability to recast societal norms and thereby to juxtapose ideological or hegemonic norms with new societal combinations, stripping the former of their necessary veneer of uniqueness, is particularly effective in fiction. Narrative fiction, whose very structure lends itself to the duplication of societal structures, permits not only the rearrangement of the artifacts of those structures, but also the refashioning of a society's conceptual underpinnings-those very concepts being what give shape to that society's culture. One of the trajectories for such a conceptual transformation is through what Deleuze and Guattari elsewhere call "conceptual personae."10 These "true agents of enunciation"11 are the inscription of the necessary parody created by a writer whose task, in Conrad's words, "is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel-it is, before all, to make you see. That-and no more, and it is everything;"12 the task of a writer who wrestles with and gives voice to the elusiveness of the moment of expression. On the one hand, this differentiates conceptual personae from characters.13 The latter are recognizable, comprehensible, and are therefore the aftereffect of enunciation; even the hero of a Bildungsroman acquires his education at the direction of the writer as teacher imbued with prescient knowledge.14 The impossibility of mastering or overtaking the moment of expression ensures that its agent effects a transformation of the writer; the text becomes the trajectory of a thinking through of what in it comes to expression. On the other hand, what comes to expression should not be mistaken for equally comprehensible "psychosocial types," as though they were merely culturally determined concretions of the zeitgeist. These types articulate the three intertwined moments described by Deleuze and Guattari in terms of territory, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization. For instance, Dickens's character Oliver Twist, that exemplary orphan who by definition is both within and outside of his society, with his refrain of "Please sir, I want some more," deterritorializes not only the gruel but also the entire territory of the institutionalized orphanage, organized according to the material needs of the orphans as determined by industrialized society, and reterritorializes its elements within a moral or political territory organized by human relationships.15 Conceptual personae, however, "show thought's territories, its absolute deterritorializations and reterritorializations."16 Such expression, as Deleuze and Guattari emphasize, is impossible without psychosocial types whose societal disposition lends them to the parodic dislocation of thought of thought (the orphan amidst the inPHILOSOPHY TODAY 464 dustrialization of England in the mid-nineteenth century), however, these very types can give rise to a dis-figurement of societal functions rather than to a figuration of thought's conceptual movements.17 A conceptual persona is this dis-figuration of a society, an interruption of the cultural determinants that define its form, whose absolute incompletion effects its determination of a "problem" that threatens to overturn the very presuppositions that allow a society to achieve a distinctive form.18To claim that Marlow is a conceptual persona is to follow Said's diagnosis and to discern in Conrad's writing a movement that threatens the very structure of imperialist society precisely by remaining complicit in its historical limitations. Said writes that Heart of Darkness cannot just be a straightforward recital of Marlow's adventures: it is also a dramatization of Marlow himself, the former wanderer in colonial regions, telling his story to a group of British listeners at a particular time and in a specific place. . . . Although the almost oppressive force of Marlow's narrative leaves us with a quite accurate sense that there is no way out of the sovereign historical force of imperialism, and that it has the power of a system representing as well as speaking for everything within its dominion, Conrad shows us that what Marlow does is contingent, acted out for a set of like-minded British hearers, and limited to that situation.19 This limitation that constitutes the structure of the novel and that renders it such a potent artifact of imperial culture must be pushed to the point of overwhelming or subsuming the very character of Marlow, who exemplifies the type of "the former wanderer in colonial regions." Conrad's character, this wanderer who is nonetheless a relentless narrator, is himself structured, delimited by Conrad's pen, a delimitation that forms as much of a structural feature of the text as its setting, and is no less rich in conflicting tendencies.20 Moreover, the presence of the unnamed narrator who tells the story of Marlow's tale indicates that, like a Russian doll, every narrator is nested within another, and each narrator is an emergent set of traits within a narrative that the art of writers like Conrad put on display in such a way that its frozen dynamism betrays the very historical contingency that the content of the tale would obscure.21 Culture and Darkness Said discerns in imperialism a "sovereign historical force," a force that dominates and determines its own past, erasing its contingencies and replacing them with a necessary march of particular ideals into actuality. With the attainment of sovereignty an imperial society deploys a set of distinctive artifacts-elements of its culture-that simultaneously delimit its particular identity and enforce this identity upon other societies as a norm. The aesthetic character of these cultural elements allows Said his initial point of purchase on the problem of imperialism. Said's book Culture and Imperialism is not simply a sequel to Orientalism, it expands the scope of the investigation conducted in the latter through a more rigorous determination of the concept of "culture." This determination is shown to hinge upon a consideration of narrative literature which, finally, opens upon the political power of narration itself. In this investigation of the peculiar physiognomy of the intertwined narratives of imperialism and the multiple forces that work against imperialism, Said accords a distinctive role to Heart of Darkness. Conrad's novella is not merely a test case for Said; Heart of Darkness reveals, if only obliquely, the constitutive conceptual apparatus by which narration works to disrupt imperialism and, indeed, any inclinations to totality whatsoever. The relation between the concepts of imperialism, culture, the narrative novel and, ultimately, narration itself form the theoretical ground of Said's reading of Conrad. One of the central claims made by Said about narration, and about Conrad's narrative in particular, is that its form-rather than its content-is what gives it its effective force at the level of culture. Therefore the form of Conrad's novella itself must be considered with specific attention to the situatedness of the narrative, the work of interruption, and to the doublings that suffuse the text-all the way down to the bare repetition of Kurtz's final words. Whereas in Orientalism, Said was concerned with the historical depiction of the Middle East in the cultural and political imagiSAID, CONRAD, AND IMPERIALISM 465 nation of Western Europe, in Culture and Imperialism the investigation shifts to a more global and pervasive concern. The reason for this shift is twofold. On the one hand is Said's perception of a more basic and pervasive pattern that lay beneath the Orientalism of Western Europe. Rather than constituting a unique development, this phenomenon is one whose characteristic symptoms-the emphasis on the "mystery" of different cultures, the insistence upon a divine or even (rational) human obligation to "beneficially" transform this foreign culture, the importance of physical violence for ensuring the untroubled legislation of reason-all are repeated in the encounters between Western Europe and other societies. Orientalism is therefore one species of the more general diagnosis of imperialism. On the other hand, another complex of symptoms is coupled with imperialism, this one more difficult to diagnose because of the idiosyncratic character that dominates each of its manifestations. Where imperialism alights one finds the active opposition of a society, an opposition that assumes the form both of opposing political parties and of the assertion of national identity.22 While this is by now a familiar complex, Said emphasizes that what is often overlooked is the fact that resistance to imperialism is never subsequent to its exercise. Resistance is equiprimordial with imperialism and, as such, not only cannot be misconstrued as re-active, but must also be recognized as possessing an equal claim to societal determination. The concept of "culture" is what permits the diagnosis of this encounter between two equally primary forces of social incorporation. On the one hand, Said writes, "culture . . . means all those practices, like the arts of description, communication, and representation, that have relative autonomy from the economic, social, and political realms and that often exist in aesthetic forms, one of whose principal aims is pleasure."23 This aspect of culture thus denotes both the art of depicting what is other than and resists a certain society, and also the art of rendering a coherent account of society. The novel is a privileged form of this art because, for Said, it is the appropriate form of expression for an encounter with the strange. This is no historical accident-the rise of the novel and the growth of imperial power are not accidental to each other-but rather forms a reflection of the ability to at least appear to domesticate the foreign. Insofar as a person or place or event can be given a name or description-a name or description whose very comprehensibility depends upon its application to multiple things, some of which have yet to be perceived-that thing becomes recognizable and familiar. And so one can describe narrative as the temporally linear appropriation ("proper rendering") not merely of the unknown, but of what initially appears as something resisting appropriation. Narrative then is simultaneously a legitimation of a form of expression over what resists it-its most familiar aspect -but it is also a form of resistance and contestation-the obverse side of its familiarity. While this is apparent in the somewhat misleadingly-named "counter-narratives" of previously colonized peoples, Said emphasizes that it is already present, if not apparent, in the active struggle of normalizing expression to domesticate the strange. It is in this always already struggling aspect of narrative that Said locates the second set of characteristics that determine the concept of "culture:" it is inherently "refining" and "elevating."24 Because culture is carried in a narrative that aims at the reduction of the strange to the familiar, it necessarily refines or hones the expression of the society that it expresses in order thereby to elevate that society into a privileged position that would legitimate its pretensions to normativity. Again, there are two aspects of this activity of narration that result from its immediate and constant contestation. On the one hand, it becomes a source of identity for those who would belong to the society that it expresses. The refinement and corresponding elevation of the narrative's expression transform it into something like a symbol of the virtues of the expression's society. At the same time, however, the narrative is also "combative" insofar as the identity it constitutes is constituted out of an immediate opposition to the resistance of the strange. As Said notes, the refinement of expression into a symbol indicates that that very expression is competing, not with the strange, but with other expressions that it cannot recognize. The result of this double refinement of the concept of culture-a refinement permitted by the analysis of narrative that shows it to be both constitutive and challenged-is that culture itPHILOSOPHY TODAY 466 self comes to mark the limits of expressive communities. In the narrative that is judged to be "great" because of its ability to render the strange or atypical in a comprehensible manner, that strangeness is struggled with at the same time that the apparent victory of expression-its depiction of the strange-becomes a token of what makes that society superior.25 Culture thus becomes what Said calls a "theater of ideologies." Because it is constituted largely through the narrative expression of the strange, culture dramatizes the values that determine its expression not only through their focused and skillful deployment, but also in contrast to the competing values that organize the expressive society that persists beneath the caricature of "the strange." Thus defined, culture reveals a connection between seemingly idle aesthetic pleasure and the sort of ideology characteristic of imperialism. Art is the eminent mark of a society's prestige only when it is forgotten that this symbol becomes what it is only in its contestation. Culture is the limit of society and its peculiar fate in imperialist societies is, to a greater or lesser degree, to stage and to indicate the very contest of values that imperialism would deny. Such a contest is staged in various ways and to different degrees by different narratives, and thus the connection of aesthetics and politics will not be able to be generalized. What Said then seeks, in Culture and Imperialism, is the dramatization of a series of narratives, a dramatization that emphasizes a narrative not as the overwhelming expression of an existing culture that takes place in the passive milieu of the strange, but as the inherently resisted and contested expression that marks the limit of two societies and determines the nature of the culture of each. The Essence of Dreams Said turns to Heart of Darkness not simply as an exemplary narrative of imperialism, but as an exemplary narrative of the narratives of imperialism: what is at issue is the very form of Conrad's novella. In his analysis of this form, Said emphasizes three relations decisive for the constitution of this form: the relation of Africa and England, of Kurtz and Marlow, and of narrative expression and interruption. Each of these relations contribute to the circular dynamic of the narrative, and this ultimately is what makes Conrad's novella so valuable for Said: in its circularity, the narrative refuses to abandon or deny the limit where culture is staged. There is no exit from either Conrad's or Marlow's narratives; in fact, each eventually rejoins the other, leaving both the reader and the narrator adrift at the edge of the heart of empire. However, if the momentum of the narrative is circular, and persists in refusing the gesture of imperialism even as it is unable to avoid continually posing the question of its legitimacy, it may be that this bare repetition is productive. Said's discussion of the novella is premised upon a well-known quote from Marlow that occurs near the end of the first part of the story when Marlow interrupts himself to express the difficulty of conveying the meaning behind the words of his tale. At this point in his narrative, Marlow has arrived at the Central Station and is delayed there by the sinking of the ship that he was to take further up the river. While there, he allows the manager to believe that he has influence in Europe so that his passage will be expedited. What strikes Marlow-so forcefully that he breaks off his story-is that he is willing to allow the untruth about his standing in Europe to persist because it may help Kurtz who, he emphasizes, he has yet to meet and remains for him only a name. "Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything?" Marlow asks his listeners on the Nellie, "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 of the very essence of dreams." After another pause comes the lines that Said cites: "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. We live, as we dream-alone."26 Despite the impossibility of expression, however, the temporal momentum is enough to guarantee that Marlow's stuttering expression has force and, for Said, the numerous interruptions of the narrative itself, as well as the digressions of Marlow's story, are drawn along by the very form of the trajectory being recounted. SAID, CONRAD, AND IMPERIALISM 467 The conflict between this unproductive failure of expression-the essential solipsism of language-and the forceful progression of the story is further highlighted by the situation in which the story is narrated. This story of determined progress is told to a group of retired sailors on a ship at anchor at the mouth of the Thames. The inertia of the Nellie forms a sharp contrast with the momentum of Marlow's story, just as Marlow is himself sharply contrasted with his listeners. These listeners are in fact not even named, they are merely designated by their respective societal and economic roles: the Director, the Lawyer, the Accountant-whereas Marlow, who carries his name, is set apart as the only one "who still "followed the sea""27-a phrase whose obliquity already indicates the difference between Marlow's persona and the clearly identified psychosocial types of his shipmates. For Said these contrasts are a product of Conrad's own expatriate status-he was an émigré from Poland-by which he was able to take stock of the very formation of imperial colonialization. Whereas the first travelers to foreign societies were characterized by an independent air, the incorporation of the colonies into the economic and social life of the colonial powers necessarily led to a standardization of overseas trade and a domestication of seafaring. This transformation is made explicit by Conrad in "Youth," a novella that precedes Heart of Darkness by one year, in which we again find Marlow himself dramatizing this transformation: narrating the story of his first voyage to the East but punctuating this narrative with the refrain "Pass the bottle"-the bottle simultaneously a product of the regularized trade that voyages such as Marlow's helped create, and also an instrument for the effacement of the contingency that gave such early sea voyages their character of individuality and adventure. Said finds a parallel effacement in Marlow's narrative in Heart of Darkness. On the one hand there are a series of juxtapositions in the narrative: Africa and England, the Congo and the Thames, Kurtz and Marlow, the "wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman"28 and the Intended. Marlow's first words-"And this also . . . has been one of the dark places on the earth."29-begin a recollection for his listeners of the time when England marked the limit of the Roman Empire. This has the effect not only of linking England and Africa, of obliterating any a priori distinction between them, but also of indicating the force of time and a notion of history as narrative that is dependent on no narrator. It is on the basis of this first juxtaposition that we can locate the second, that of Marlow and Kurtz. As the episode at the Central Station shows-although there are other indications as well-Marlow finds himself in some way allied to Kurtz before they have even met. At the same time, Conrad's novella constantly troubles this kinship by reinforcing each character with the quality of solitude. Indeed, this near-monomania is what links the two, as well as what prevents their accord-allowing each the distance to critique the judgment of the other-and makes both of them avatars of imperial society. Their mutual relation to the strange is then thematized by perhaps the most singular juxtaposition of the novella: that of the "wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman" and the Intended. On the one hand, the former's relationship with Kurtz is rendered with Kafkaesque ambiguity-never is the reader sure what passes between them and, on the other hand, her relationship to Marlow-who feels a combination of allure and fear-is the classic figuration of the feminine lure of the Orient. The Intended is an almost inverse figure, her relationship to both Marlow and Kurtz clear and direct, but premised in one case on a verbal lie, and in the other upon a faith that the lie only sustains. These juxtapositions, highlighted from out of the "ironic distance" that the émigré Conrad preserves in Heart of Darkness as well as his other works, gives rise to what Said calls two possible arguments or visions of a post-colonial world. One argument would legitimate and solidify the position of imperialist culture, drawing a line from the now civilized and enlightened England, to Marlow's relentless journey upriver and Kurtz's civilizing plans (both of which fail to bring change only because, as the manager of the Central Station tells Marlow, "the time was not yet ripe for vigorous action"),30 to the dangerous but seductive "apparition of a woman" that entices and entreats the colonizers, and, finally, to the Intended who incarnates the heart of the empire and sustains its faith. This first argument leads to a consolidation if not an outright legitimation of imperialism. According to its figuration PHILOSOPHY TODAY 468 of the political aesthetic, any resistant society is subjected to what Said calls "rhetorical slaughter." This excess leads, in turn, to a sympathy for counter-imperialist insurgencies; insurgencies that merely end up repeating its gestures because they borrow their narrative form from imperialism. In this repetition, opposition dissolves as the conflict becomes one simply of authority rather than ideology. But this first argument is coupled with and troubled by another that Conrad seems no less insistent upon. For Said, the key to this other interpretation is the specificity with which Conrad dates his narratives, placing them within a particular historically situated society and, in the case of "Youth" and Heart of Darkness, linking the narrative to the particular position of the narrator within a colonial society. The effect of this second argument is to broach the possibility of a narrative, and a society, that is organized in a fundamentally different way than imperialist narratives and their societies. Said writes that this "is a profoundly secular perspective, and it is beholden neither to notions about historical destiny and the essentialism that destiny always seems to entail, nor to historical indifference and resignation."31 And in Conrad we find the possibility of such a narrative in the resonance between the irruptions of the unexpressable that stutter Marlow's narrative, in the persisting lack of coincidence between Kurtz and Marlow, in the almost contradictory figures of the feminine, and, finally, in "the horror," the doubled refrain that betrays the lie of imperialist ambition, and the lie at the heart of its essence, serving both to absurdly caricature the "apparition of a woman" and to betray the falsity of the Intended. The irreducibility of these two arguments constitutes Conrad's greatness and also his impotence for Said. Greatness because, in the midst of a flourishing system of global imperialism, Conrad was able to extricate himself from it and to pose its essence and activities as a question. Impotence because this posing could offer no alternative, could not even offer an outright condemnation of imperialism. Quoting Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, Said describes Conrad as a writer who, entering "the maelstrom of an unending process of expansion, will, as it were, cease to be what he was and obey the laws of the process, identify himself with anonymous forces that he is supposed to serve in order to keep the whole process in motion, he will think of himself as mere function, and eventually consider such functionality, such an incarnation of the dynamic trend, his highest possible achievement."32 Heart of Darkness, then, is not merely an element of imperialist culture, it is a staging of that culture itself, a staging of the limit of a society that, as its limit, necessarily bears within itself what is strange and irreducible to that culture. However, what remains decisive for Said, again following Arendt, is Conrad's inability to put forward a counterproposal to the machinations of imperialism. At the limit of imperialist culture, Conrad nevertheless remains implicated by it. Said's reading of Heart of Darkness is premised upon both its narrative form and its symbolic content, both of which betray and contest its imperialist origin. However, in Said's reading the content ultimately supersedes the narrative form as the site of contestation. This is to forget, or at least minimize, what Said has already said about narrative and the novel: that they are the particular forms of the encounter of colonial society with the strange. Not only is the strange appropriated by the expression of the novel's narrative, but this narrative itself structures and is structured by the strange. In other words, narrative itself is staged at the limits of imperialism, as the tell-tale mark of its culture. Toward the end of Culture and Imperialism, Said turns to this question of the relationship of narrative form to imperial society when he writes, "The question is, Where? And where too, we might ask, is there a place for that astonishingly harmonious vision of time intersecting with the timeless."33 This intersection is the very thing that draws Said to Conrad: the intersection of Conrad's specific life with the timeless and monolithic constructs of imperialism. What frustrates Said in his reading of Conrad is the latter's seeming inability to resolutely takes sides against the forceful, homogenizing force of imperialism. However, it may be that by looking at the representations and expressions of both imperialism and the strange within Conrad's narrative, Said misses the way that the very form or style of Heart of Darkness works against imperialism. Indeed, is this not the very lesson that the inconceivability of the two arguments of the SAID, CONRAD, AND IMPERIALISM 469 novella teaches us? Far from being misleading, Said's reading, by juxtaposing the conflicting expressions at work in the novella, leads to the very heart of the problem: the resistance of the novella to its very form. While this resistance is extensive-and Said catalogs a number of its elements34-three are decisive. The first is the situatedness of the narrative: not only who is telling it, but also how, and the extent to which Conrad sets up, with a great deal of care, the situation on the Nellie. The second is the work of interruption in the main body of the text, both where it occurs and also how it fundamentally alters the momentum of the narration. Finally, the third formal element of resistance in the novella is the refrain of Kurtz's final words, a refrain that shatters the relentless itinerary of Marlow and opens the narration onto the final, almost spectral pages. Attention to these formal rebellions provide some evidence for claiming that by breaking the narrative form Conrad is in fact able to break with imperialist culture. The Empire Beneath a Spectral Moon The narrative of Heart of Darkness is initially situated and determined in two ways: by the positioning of the Nellie and her passengers, and by the narrator's opening description of Marlow. As Said points out, with the exception of Marlow, the characters arranged on the deck of the Nellie are seamen who have left off the adventurous days of their youth and entered into the more direct and placid economic service of the Empire. They are, however, out for a cruise-presided over by the Director of Companies-rather than for any business purposes. At dusk, they arrive at the mouth of the Thames where they are forced to weigh anchor and wait for the tide to turn. The Nellie thus sits with her bow to the sea as Conrad emphasizes when he writes that the Director "stood in the bows looking to seaward. . . . It was difficult to realize his work was not out there in the luminous estuary, but behind him, within the brooding gloom."35 Marlow is sitting in the stern of the boat-the narrator notes that he had "a straight back, an ascetic aspect, and, with his arms dropped, the palms of hands outwards, resembled an idol."36-and he is joined there by the rest of the ship's complement as the story opens. There a silence takes over, matching the stillness of the ship at anchor, as the sun sinks and the narrator reflects on the "change" that came over the Thames; a change that reflects its memories, the ships and figures that have issued forth and returned from it. Just before the sun sets, he concludes "What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires."37 Only when the sun has gone down does Marlow begin to speak. Conrad's precision in describing the situation on the Nellie shows its importance for the narrative that emerges-and the fact that the story never leaves the ship is essential. The ship is at anchor with its stern in the West and its bow facing East. All of the people on board retreat to its stern as the sun sets, following its apparent descent, remaining in its light as long as possible, and moving as far as possible from the East, toward which the yacht is nonetheless faced. This situation is a staging of the Orientalist attitude: at the limit of the known, the imperialist draws back from the mystery of the East that nonetheless remains seductive and beckoning. The use of the tide to figure this double movement is significant-as is the role of the sea in Conrad's work, where for his sailors it represents the perpetually unknown-marking both the separation of the colonizer and the colonized (a separation ultimately minimized or erased by the establishment of regular trade routes) and the indeterminate limit that binds them together. At anchor in the ebb of the tide, Conrad has placed the narrative of Heart of Darkness precisely at the limit of imperial culture. Moreover, in doing so, he has created an aesthetic object that literally undercuts the very society of which it is an esteemed symbol. When Marlow speaks the sun has set behind him, making him no more than a shadow to his audience. He faces East, down the length of the yacht, which is also the traditional facing of the statue of a deity in a shrine-and Marlow is explicitly likened to an idol by the narrator, who describes him as having "the pose of a Buddha preaching in European clothes and without a lotus-flower."38-because this facing connotes the rebirth that occurs with the rising of the sun in the East. Marlow's speech, then, not only flows against the ebbing of the tide, but emerges from the archaic heart of imperialPHILOSOPHY TODAY 470 ism-and this is further reinforced by the first words that he speaks, which concern England's status as a colonial holding of the Roman Empire. Moreover, the narrative is a remembrance, giving the scene the air of a memorial rather than a temple. The narrative itself is therefore constituted by a series of opposing movements: Marlow's voice and the tide, remembrance and the present, and, finally, imperialism and the strange-all of which are presided over by a gathering darkness. These oppositions are emphasized by Conrad when the narrator remarks, following Marlow's insistence on the "idea" that alone redeems the brutality of imperialism, that the Nellie's passengers "were fated, before the ebb began to run, to hear about one of Marlow's inconclusive experiences."39 The contradictory elements of the rhetorical staging of Heart of Darkness do more work than the content of the book; or, rather, the content remains determined by this rhetorical form: set at the limits of imperialism, the narrative itself is an allegory of the irreconcilability of imperialism with itself. The very form of Conrad's novella opens the limit of culture to its obverse side in a very distinctive way: a way that permits that side to abandon the very form of the limit that constitutes the culture proper to imperialism. Following Marlow's first words the narrator contrasts him with others who "follow the sea:" "The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to 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."40 The setting of the Nellie is ideal for such an episode: Marlow's narrative flows out from the West but, undercut by the flowing of the tide and faced with the immensity of the sea, it directly illuminates nothing. Later, speaking of the Company politics that he finds himself embroiled in, Marlow remarks that "The essentials of this affair lay deep under the surface, beyond my reach, and beyond my power of meddling."41 Illuminating nothing, Marlow's narrative instead serves only, paradoxically, to obliquely indicate a haze or a fog, a region of indeterminacy coupled to both the narrative and to the Nellie (as well as to Marlow's unnamed ship as he travels up the Congo). Producing a haze from the reflected light of the moon, a light that shines only in the darkness: this is the essential character of Marlow's narrative and Conrad's indictment of any attempt successfully to mediate the "civilizing idea" at the heart of imperialism with its barbaric acts. Indeed, this may be the greatest achievement of the novella: it refutes the possibility of any justifiable mediation between the "idea" of civilization and its concrete atrocities. Following Marlow's introductory remarks on the colonial history of England, during which he breaks off his narrative twice, he begins the narration of his trip up the Congo River in search of Kurtz. Conrad takes great care to situate this narrative within a larger context. While the story of Marlow's journey up the Congo is often cited for its exemplary status as a figuration of imperialist aggression, Said's analysis has indicated the way for a reading that renders the narrative deeply ambiguous even at the level of description.42 The same is true of the narrative taken formally. Throughout the narrative there is a sub-current of critical self-reflection that rises in intensity and reaches its most extreme pitch when Marlow encounters Kurtz, although its reverberations organize the conclusion of Marlow's story as he relates his actions upon returning to England. However, in addition to this influx that undercuts the progression of Marlow's story, there are four distinct moments when this counter-tendency overwhelms the momentum of the narrative. The first of these-actually a stuttering of three silences-occurs as Marlow is talking with the brickmaker at the Central Station who offers a rambling account of Kurtz. Here Marlow breaks off over the seeming insufficiency of words to convey the figure of Kurtz, or even bear the weight of the story-although his frustration may also be read in terms of the inability of his listeners to hear the story itself. Moreover, not only is it the insufficiency of words that seems to definitively undercut the story, but the narrative has ceased to be anything but words, Marlow and the rest of the Nellie having fallen into complete darkness: the narrator "listen[ing] on the watch for the SAID, CONRAD, AND IMPERIALISM 471 sentence, for the word, that would give me the clue to the faint uneasiness inspired by this narrative that seemed to shape itself without human lips in the heavy night-air of the river."43 The second interruption comes during Marlow's lengthy description of the river above the Central Station. He speaks of having to occupy himself with mundane tasks of navigation with the result that "the reality . . . fades. The inner truth is hidden,"44 and he extends this comment to the daily activities of those listening to him on the Nellie. Rather than merely breaking off, Marlow is here interrupted and told to be "civil" by one of these listeners-an indication that Marlow's audience is indeed attentive to the way that the narrative, while seemingly applying familiar expressions to the strange, is at the same time rendering strange what is apparently the most mundane. The third interruption follows the attack on Marlow's ship that convinces him that Kurtz is dead and that Marlow would never have a chance to speak with him-although he later learns that Kurtz ordered the attack-and he realizes that speaking with Kurtz has become the reason for his journey. "The point was in he [Kurtz] being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out preeminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words-the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness."45 At this point, someone on the Nellie lets out a sigh and Marlow again speaks of the "absurdity" of trying to express the essence of what happened. Hesitating in his account, Marlow strikes a match and lights his pipe, revealing his face for the first time as it is caught in the flickering light. Having already rendered Marlow as a purely linguistic being, this flickering disclosure of his face, coupled to the words that give the novella its title, emphasizes the ultimate impotence of language to establish meaning-a si tuat ion that Marlow characterizes with the word "absurd." Finally, just after this interruption, Marlow breaks off again, this time as he is drowned by the multiplicity of voices that compose the story-faltering specifically over "the girl," the Intended, toward whom, in his faltering, Marlow adopts the attitude of Kurtz, stuttering "she is out of it-completely. They-the women I mean-are out of it-should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse."46 Following the chain of narrative breaks that terminates here, this statement by Marlow, repeating and even almost channeling Kurtz, repeats the alibi and the lie that allows for the perseverance of imperialism even in the face of its atrocities: the idea of another world. It is this idea that determines Kurtz's final words which, in turn, determine Marlow's meeting with the Intended. "The horror. The horror." In their repetition, these words constitute a refrain that simultaneously condenses the strange that constitutes the obverse side of the limit of imperial culture, and the idea of civilization that not only determines and coordinates this limit, but promises its mediation. When he hears them, Marlow takes them up-"it is not my own extremity I remember best. . . . No! It is his extremity that I seem to have lived through."47 Returning to England he is assailed by various personages that strip away the trappings of Kurtz, again leaving only the idea. Later, Marlow remarks that "All that had been Kurtz's had passed out of my hands: his soul, his body, his station, his plans, his ivory, his career. There remained only his memory and his Intended."48-a memory and a promise that will, in Conrad's narrative, prove irreconcilable. Marlow visits the Intended at dusk and in their conversation, composed largely of her filling the gaps where Marlow's voice breaks off, the light inexorably fades with an insistence that Conrad's text makes clear. The Intended insists upon the bright nobility of the civilizing idea that Kurtz carried when he left and Marlow, anxious to leave as soon as he arrives, allows her to persist in her dreamy imaginings. But then he is caught: she asks to hear Kurtz's dying words. It is here that the narrative ends-the novella is not merely a tale of a river journey-because it is here that Marlow is forced to render up a decisive response to the contradictions that form his narrative. "I pulled myself together and spoke slowly. "The last word he spoke was-your name."49 The Intended is exultant, finding her almost messianic idea of Kurtz confirmed; and Marlow remarks to himself, "I could not tell her. It would PHILOSOPHY TODAY 472 have been too dark-too dark altogether."50 Here, finally, in the refrain of Kurtz's final words, Conrad gives a doubly paradoxical expression to the irreducible contradiction of imperialist culture. On the one hand, the idea of justice, the civilizing idea that guides imperial action, cannot be named, cannot become actual, even as it is sure of its own power (and because of this surety). On the other hand, the action of the idea is utterly unknown to itself, to the extent that it finds no words for its deeds. Conclusion Toward the end of Culture and Imperialism, Said formulates the irreconcilability of imperial culture as that between "the logic of daring" that formulates the civilizing idea of imperialism, and "the massive dislocations, waste, misery, and horrors endured in our century's migrations and mutilated lives."51 The form and structure of Marlow's narrative show that Conrad too, in Heart of Darkness, caught sight of this disjunction. But to claim that he was prevented from offering a counter-idea to imperialism implies that there is ultimately a program that will set justice to work in the world. Conrad is not silent on the question of justice-on the contrary, Marlow gives an answer in the lie that completes Kurtz's final words. The idea of justice is to be allowed to endure, blind to the misdeeds of its errant minions, and these minions are to be opposed, precisely in the name of justice. Justice is the name of the agency of ethical transformation, and therefore it necessarily cannot be recuperated within the concretion of its acts. However, what Said's discussion of Heart of Darkness rightly discerns is that aesthetics is a contested and contesting aspect of culture, a uniquely political dimension given its ability to stage, and thereby parody, the errant trajectories of sovereignty.52 The structure of Conrad's novella summons its readers to the very idea of justice. If the content of Heart of Darkness gives rise to a narrative of anti-imperialism, to a reversal of the limit of culture, its form does something else; it goes further, and with more audacity. When, in the closing pages of Culture and Imperialism, Said turns briefly to the notion of "deterritorialization" as an intellectual practice of repeating the gestures of imperialism amidst new ecologies that permit inventive transformations rather than formulaic mediations, what draws him is precisely the inability to provide a program for such an activity. "Nomadic" practices are never prescribed, they follow no orthodoxy-for who in good conscience could wish the life of a nomad onto another or themselves? Writing of Nietzsche's relation to the conceptual persona of Zarathustra, Pierre Klossowski states that the former, "after having given voice to the triumph of Zarathustra, will remain behind in a position sacrificed in the course of a victorious retreat."53 Although Marlow will return in two other significant novels by Conrad, Lord Jim and Chance, in each case he does so only to reemphasize the expression of a facet of the culture that he exemplifies in Heart of Darkness. Creating an elaborately detailed stage for this limit itself, Conrad's novella insists upon the repetition of the limit, the continual struggle for and against justice, not as a negative consequence of not being able to formulate a non-imperial system, but as the positive consequence of resisting forcing such expressions into formulation. It is Said's greatest gift to those who live on to have provided an articulation of the very essence of Conrad's problem. Far from occluding issues of race and colonialism behind a structure of literary theory, Said's concept of culture permits the exhibition of writing as the theater of the limits of society, a proscenium for its fears, prejudices, unvoiced hopes and tenebrous desires. At the tip of Conrad's pen, restlessly circumscribed by the repeatedly fractured "Marlow," is the element of cultural limitation whose limitless repetition Said emphasizes and, in so doing, passes on as a task. "The ultimate aim of literature," Deleuze writes, echoing and amplifying Said, "is to set free . . . this creation of a health or this invention of a people, that is, a possibility of life."54 SAID, CONRAD, AND IMPERIALISM 473 ENDNOTES PHILOSOPHY TODAY 474 1. Hélène Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," in Literary Debate: Texts and Contexts, ed. Denis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman, (New York: The New Press, 1999), 411. 2. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 195–98. 3. Ibid., 198. Note that Ryle's insight here is certainly compatible with his behaviorism, but it does not compel acceptance of that theory. The point here in fact concerns the very problem that behaviorism and other theories of the mind attempt to resolve. 4. One of Conrad's earlier critics, F. R. Leavis, writes of Heart of Darkness in his The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (New York: G. W. Stewart, 1948), that "the same vocabulary, the same adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery, is applied to the evocation of human profundities and spiritual horrors; to magnifying a thrilled sense of the unspeakable potentialities of the human soul. The actual effect is not to magnify but to muffle." For Leavis this "adjectival insistence" detracts from the power of the chain of specific and concrete events that constitutes the narrative. Such a criticism presumes that the force of Conrad's novel is exhausted in its mere evocativeness. However, the very extensiveness of the expressive obfuscation cited by Leavis is actually an argument for its essentiality to the work. Albert J. Guerard, in his Conrad the Novelist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), takes what Leavis regards as an error to be in fact the constitution of a second series of events, parallel to those specific and concrete events emphasized by Leavis, that recount a psychological journey. There is, of course, a third option that characterizes Edward Said's reading: namely that Conrad's narrative is neither psychological nor concrete but cultural, staging the uncertainties and inconsistencies that Conrad diagnoses in his own imperialist society through a series of worldly events. 5. "Youth" was originally published in 1898 in Blackwood's Magazine, and then again in a book, together with Heart of Darkness and The End of the Tether, in 1902. Lord Jim was published in 1900; Chance appeared in 1913. 6. This imminent catastrophe of writing is discussed by Maurice Blanchot in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), as well as The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). Speaking of what he calls "the essential solitude," Blanchot writes, "The writer seems to be the master of his pen; he can become capable of great mastery over words and over what he wants to make them express. But his mastery only succeeds in putting him, keeping him in contact with the fundamental passivity where the word, no longer anything but its appearance – the shadow of a word – never can be mastered or even grasped" (The Space of Literature, 25). 7. One of the most significant events in Conrad scholarship was Chinua Achebe's 1975 lecture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in which he claimed that Heart of Darkness proved that Conrad was "a bloody racist." Achebe's lecture was published first in The Massachusetts Review in 1977, and then, slightly amended, in Achebe's Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965–1987 (London: Heinemann, 1988), and again in the third edition of the Norton Critical Edition of Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough, (New York: Norton, 1988). The root of Achebe's criticism lies in his diagnosis of a pervasive psychological need for the Western psyche to use Africa and Africans as a sort of foil for its own narrative of enlightened progress. Conrad then can be faulted for failing to discern, criticize, and reject the racism that pervades Marlow's description of the Africans that he encountered in his journey. However, Achebe's biographical criticism of Conrad rests upon the presupposition that all literature is tasked with the duty to provide an unambiguous moral norm. He writes that Conrad "neglects to hint, clearly and adequately, at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of his characters." However, this begs the question as to whether the absence of such a frame of reference is in fact due to "neglect" or whether it is intrinsic to Conrad's work. Although Achebe asserts that "it would not have been beyond Conrad's power to make that provision [the interjection of a stable frame of moral reference within the story] if he had thought it necessary," the rejoinder could be made that precisely the exercise of that power would have stripped Heart of Darkness of its ability to mirror and stage the very concrete injustices of his culture. For an extensive discussion of Achebe's criticism, including differences among the versions, see Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness, ed. Nicolas Tredell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 71– 103. 8. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, (New York: Knopf, 1993), 331. Deleuze and Guattari's principal discussion of the war machine is found in A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), "1227: Treatise on Nomadology – The War Machine," 351–432. SAID, CONRAD, AND IMPERIALISM 475 9. The war machine thus operates upon the "materiality" of things, the inevitable gap between the thing and its historical meaning that practical reason ceaselessly works to efface, but that perpetually threatens to overturn this effacement in its temporal endurance. This commonality explains the conjunction of Said's discussion of Deleuze and Guattari with his discussion of Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 1974). Adorno concludes an aphorism entitled "Gaps" by remarking: "Thought waits to be woken one day by the memory of what has been missed, and to be transformed into teaching" (81). 10. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 61– 83. 11. Ibid., 65. 12. Conrad, Joseph, The Nigger of the "Narcissus," ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: Norton, 1971). 13. "The difference between conceptual personae and aesthetic figures consists first of all in this: the former are the powers of concepts, and the latter are the powers of affects and percepts. . . . The great aesthetic figures of thought and the novel but also of painting, sculpture, and music produce affects that surpass ordinary affections and perceptions, just as concepts go beyond everyday opinions" (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 65). 14. The most notable example of this being Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. In Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), Terry Pinkard writes: "Thus the Phenomenology serves as the Bildung (the education, formation, and cultivation) of its intended readership into coming to terms with what is entailed in their form of life and what kinds of alternatives are available to them" (17). 15. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, ed. Fred Kaplan (New York: Norton, 1993), 28. 16. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 69, (emphasis in the original). 17. Ibid., 70. 18. According to Deleuze and Guattari, problems and concepts are codeterminants in philosophical thinking. Concepts are formed in response to problems which themselves become intelligible only through their determination by the concepts that articulate them. Significantly, this codetermination is a product of the impossibility of attaining to a completely original and presuppositionless beginning from which thought might commence. Philosophical or conceptual thinking begins in the midst of a world that is always already underway and that therefore only attains to sense according to a conceptual determination whose trajectory is apparent only in a retrospective look that reveals the problem that gave rise to the particular solution instantiated by the constellation of concepts. 19. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, (New York: Knopf, 1993), 23–24. 20. Said writes: "Marlow, for example is never straightforward. He alternates between garrulity and stunning eloquence, and rarely resists making peculiar things seem more peculiar by surprisingly misstating them, or rendering them vague and contradictory" (ibid., 29). Ian Watt, in his Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), characterizes Conrad's technique as "delayed decoding," which mirrors the gap between an experience and the ability to make sense of that experience. 21. "With Conrad, then, we are in a world being made and unmade more or less all the time" (Said, Culture and Imperialism, 29). 22. Ibid., xii. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., xiii. 25. Ibid. 26. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: Norton, 1988), 30. 27. Ibid., 9. 28. Ibid., 60. 29. Ibid., 9. 30. Ibid., 61. 31. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 28. 32. Ibid., 24–25; the quote from Arendt comes from her description of Cecil Rhodes, the fervent British imperialist of the Nineteenth Century whose ideas of colonizing Africa for the betterment of the human race make him an often cited source for Conrad's Kurtz. Cf. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1973), 215. 33. Ibid., 331. 34. Ibid., 29. 35. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 7. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 8. 38. Ibid., 10. 39. Ibid., 11. 40. Ibid., 9. 41. Ibid., 40. 42. One example of the former type of reading that sees in Heart of Darkness a narrative that symbolizes imperialist aggression is found in Eloise Knapp Hay, The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963). Significantly, Hay's reading emphasizes the distinction between Conrad, the narrator, and Marlow. Elmhurst College, Elmhurst, IL 60126–3296 PHILOSOPHY TODAY 476 43. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 30. 44. Ibid., 36. 45. Ibid., 48. 46. Ibid., 49. 47. Ibid., 69. 48. Ibid., 71. 49. Ibid., 75. 50. Ibid., 76. 51. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 332. 52. Much of Jacques Derrida's later work is concerned with what he calls "the democracy to come" and the question of sovereignty. Specifically, Derrida is interested in the compatibility of democracy and sovereignty. This question is explored most thoroughly in Rogues, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 53. Pierre Klossowski, "Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody," trans. Russell Ford, Bulletin for the Société Américaine de Philosophie de Langue Française 14 (Fall 2004): 80. 54. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 4.