Junyk, Beyond the Dialectic

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Beyond the Dialectic: Conrad, Levinas, and the Scene of Recognition

Ihor Junyk

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 54, Number 1, Spring 2008, pp.

140-159 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2008.0018

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Beyond The Dialectic140

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MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 54 number 1, Spring 2008. Copyright for the Purdue ResearchFoundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

BEYONDTHEDIALECTIC:

CONRAD, LEVINAS, ANDTHE

SCENEOFRECOGNITION

Ihor Junyk

We were married within a fortnight. Traddles and Sophy, and

Doctor and Mrs. Strong, were the only guests at our quiet

wedding. We left them full of joy; and drove away together.

Clasped in my embrace, I held the source of every worthyaspiration I had ever had, the center of myself, the circle of

my life, my own, my wife. . .

Charles Dickens, David Coppereld

Can we now, perhaps, nd the place where strangeness

was present, the place where a person succeeded in setting

himself free? . . . Perhaps at this point is an Other set free?

Paul Celan, "The Meridian"

"[V]iolence," writes Emmanuel Levinas, "does not consist somuch in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting theircontinuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognizethemselves, making them betray not only commitments but theirown substance" (Totality 21). While Levinas refers to a situationof war, Charles Dickens, in the selection quoted above, allows usto glimpse the potential for the occurrence of that same profoundviolence on a daily basis in our interpersonal relations. Dickens's be-sotted newlywed enacts the transformation of an Other into a thing.

While his feverish discourse is meant to express the intensity of his


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love for Agnes, his new wife, it actually reduces her to the statusof an object to be possessed, transforming her into an anonymousplaceholder in a network of narcissistic needs and desires. Dickens

alerts us to the simultaneous banality and profundity of this prosaiceveryday violence: banal because it is so unspectacular, involving nobloodshed or armed conict, merely the claims and demands of loveor friendship; profound, precisely because of this banality, becauseof its constant, unremarked occurrence in the relationships that wevalue most highly.

In the Phenomenology of Spirit, in the section entitled "In-dependence and Dependence of Self Consciousness: Lordship andBondage," Friedrich Hegel elaborates a model of these violent in-

terpersonal relations: the scene of recognition.1

According to Hegel,when two subjects approach each other, both looking for recogni-tion, the unavoidable outcome is conict resulting in the victory andvalorization of one, the Master, and the subjection, the totalization,of the other, the Slave. Hegel's dark view of this encounter has hada profound effect on Western philosophical thought, particularly inthe twentieth century.2Is there a way beyond the demands of rec-ognition and the inevitable aggression to which it leads, or are wedoomed to continually engage one another in this fashion? In hisnovella Heart of Darkness,Joseph Conrad directly confronts theseissues. Instead of an ethos of violence, Conrad presents a revitalizedethics (although one conceived in a manner very different from thatof Kant). In fact, I would like to suggest that Conrad is very close tothe ethical thought of Emmanuel Levinas and that by approachingHeart of Darknessthrough Levinas the reader is opened to a decisivemove beyond Hegel's Master-Slave dialectic.

Conrad and His Critics

It seems particularly apposite to turn to Conrad's text in a dis-cussion of ethics, for this register has been paramount in discussionsof the novel over the past thirty years. For an earlier generation ofcritics, formal and stylistic matters, on the one hand, and Conrad'suse of mythical narrative paradigms, on the other hand, comprisedthe major focus.3Chinua Achebe's strident indictment of the novelin his Chancellor's Lecture at the University of Massachusetts, Am-herst on February 18, 1975 decidedly shifted the focus of criticismto what constituted in this view the text's questionable ethics of

representation.4In his speech and subsequent article Achebe un-ambiguously declared that "Conrad was a bloody racist" (Achebe788).5 For Achebe, the thoroughgoing racism of the novel makesit a profoundly unethical text, one that violently reduces Africa "to


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the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind" and"celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion ofthe human race." Achebe underscores this critique with the coup de

grce of a historical analogy, comparing Conrad to "all those men inNazi Germany who lent their talent to the service of virulent racism"(789).6This perspective has been extremely inuential, and whilediffering from Achebe in various ways, critics as diverse as FrancesSingh, Marianna Torgovnick, and Michael Taussig have presentedsimilar critiques of Conrad's novel.7

But if some have attempted to demonstrate the violent andcolonialist character of the book, others have presented it in preciselythe opposite light: as a model of ethical engagement. This is perhaps

most evident in James Clifford's gloss on the novel in The Predica-ment of Culture. Where Achebe saw the novel as a violent reduction,Clifford sees it as a dialogical engagement with cultural differencethat resists the pull to synthesis or totalization. For Clifford, Heartof Darkness"recognizes and constitutes different domains of truth"and "does not permit a feeling of centeredness, coherent dialogue,or authentic communion" (99, 102). As such it stands as a modelfor ethnographic research and representation: "Anthropology is stillwaiting for its Conrad" (96).

Another remarkable volte-face from Achebe's position is LeaWernick Fridman's assessment of Conrad in her recent book on therepresentation of the Holocaust, Words and Witness. Where Achebesaw Conrad's book as analogous to the criminal activities of the myr-midons of the Third Reich, Fridman sees it as an exemplary struggleto represent the unrepresentable and as such a key model for at-tempts to bear witness to historical atrocities, most notably thoseperpetrated by the Third Reich.8

My reading of Heart of Darknessbuilds on these and other recentattempts to rediscover the moral core of Conrad's text. But it also

takes these analyses in another direction. Conrad stages in effect tworecognition scenes, both of which conclude very differently from thatdescribed by Hegel. Marlow's meetings with Kurtz and the Intendedend not in the globalization of one perspective to the detriment ofthe otherwhich is to say, in domination and incorporation of theother into the samebut in the afrmation of alterity, respect, andresponsibility.

Marlow and Kurtz

The entire narrative of Heart of Darknessseems to anticipatethe rst encounter. In his three-month stay at the Central StationMarlow becomes fascinated with Kurtz. The subsequent journey up


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the Congo is presented as an inexorable movement towards him:"while the wooded banks slipped past us slowly, the short noisewas left behind, the interminable miles of silenceand we crept on,

towards Kurtz" (Conrad 53).9Marlow's movement, however, is notonly forward in space, but also back in time, to a primordial era andto an archetypal, mythological past:

Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliestbeginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on theearth and the big trees were kings. . . . We were wandererson prehistoric earth, on the earth that wore the aspect ofan unknown planet . . . we were traveling in the night ofthe rst ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardlya signand no memories. (4851)

Marlow enacts what can only be described as an archetypal journeyinto a veritable underworld. The forthcoming encounter with Kurtz,then, is presented, not as an ordinary meeting, but as a primal sceneof recognition, a primordial, mythical event.

Further, we can see that Marlow expects something signicantfrom this meeting. For Marlow, Kurtz is not a human being, a creatureof esh and blood, but a voice: "I made the strange discovery thatI had never imagined him as doing, you know, but as discoursing. Ididn't say to myself, 'Now I will never see him,' or 'Now I will nevershake him by the hand,' but, 'Now I will never hear him.' The manpresented himself as a voice" (67). As a voice, Kurtz becomes TheWord, a numinous being, a deity who will give Marlow fundamentalknowledge or presence.

When he arrives at the station, however, Marlow encounters avery different Kurtz. Instead of The Word, or even a voice, Marlownds a fallen man. Kurtz has "gone native." Away from the restraintsof European civilization Kurtz nds that the jungle whispers "things

about himself which he did not know" and he recovers all of his"forgotten and brutal instincts" (83, 94). Soon Kurtz is participatingin "unspeakable rites" and adorning his hut with shrunken heads,not turned outward to serve as a warning, but inward so that he cancontemplate and admire them (71). Initially committed to the "Sup-pression of Savage Customs," once in the wilderness Kurtz takes "highseat amongst the devils of the land" (70, 71). He sets himself up asa god with the "power to charm or frighten rudimentary souls intoan aggravated witch dance in his honour" (72). However, by the time

of the recognition scene Kurtz's seduction by the darkness has lefthim broken and shattered. When Marlow nds Kurtz in the jungle hehas regressed to animality, crawling pathetically on all fours. Initially,while searching for Kurtz, Marlow pictures their immanent encounter


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as a Hegelian ght. He notes that he "had some vague notion of fall-ing upon him and giving him a drubbing" (93). He even threatens tosmash Kurtz's head in. But he does nothing of the kind. Even with

Kurtz's weakened condition and his assured victory, Marlow avoidsany conict or struggle. Instead of dominating or enslaving Kurtz,Marlow helps him, supporting him as they walk down the hill to thecabin, Kurtz's bony hand clasped around his neck.

If Marlow does not enslave Kurtz, neither is he enslaved byhim. Although Kurtz is in a weakened state, he still has the HegelianMaster's desire to swallow the entire world. Even though he is noth-ing more than a skeleton Marlow notes: "I saw him open his mouthwideit gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he had

wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him"(8586). When Kurtz intones "My Intended, my career, my station,my ideas," he cannot number Marlow among his possessions, hisconquests (98). Unlike the harlequin, who is entirely under Kurtz'sdomination, Marlow maintains his distance, irony, and autonomy.

Marlow, then, abandons the anticipated Hegelian dialecticalbattle of mastery and slavery. Acknowledging Kurtz's degradation,he assumes radical responsibility for him. After Kurtz reveals the fullextent of his fall, Marlow does not forsake him but afrms: "I didnot betray Mr. Kurtzit was written I should be loyal to the night-mare of my choice" and "I remained to dream the nightmare out tothe end, and to show my loyalty to Kurtz once more" (100). This isevidenced by the responsibility Marlow takes for Kurtz's papers. Heprotects Kurtz's image, refusing to let his private correspondence fallinto the wrong hands and rips the incriminating postscript from thereport on the "Suppression of Savage Customs" before releasing itfor publication.

How are we to understand this radical turn from dialecticalviolence to responsibility? In order to help us answer this question I

would like to turn to the thought of Emmanuel Levinas.

From Dialectic to Responsibility

As an alternative to assigning primacy, as Heidegger does, toontology, Levinas articulates a world characterized by the slogan of"ethics as rst philosophy." Levinas's meontology begins with thequestion: "But how can the same, produced as egoism, enter intorelationship with an other without immediately divesting it of its alter-

ity? What is the nature of this relationship?" (Totality38). Levinas'sanswer is the face-to-face encounter. This is a relationship with theother that is "neither a struggle, nor a fusion, nor a knowledge"("Time" 50). It is a meeting "without intermediary, and is furnished


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for us in the eros where, in the other's proximity, distance is integrallymaintained, and whose pathos is made of both this proximity andduality" (54). The face-to-face, then, is an encounter that rejects

both the totalizing grasp of the other individual and absolute dissocia-tion or indifference. Instead, it afrms both proximity and distance,negotiating connection and alterity.

How is this to be done? The face-to-face, Levinas tells us, opensus to responsibility, which is to say, to language, to the "to say" ordire(as opposed to the said or dit), to our ability to respond. Levinaswrites:

The essence of the 'word' does not initially consist in itsobjective meaning or descriptive possibilities, but in theresponse that it elicits. The assertion is not true becausethe thought that it expresses corresponds to the thing orbecause it is revelatory of being. . . . The assertion is truewhen it realizes the reciprocity of the relation by elicitinga response and singling out an individual who alone is ca-pable of responding. This conception of truth has nothingin common with the static notion of truth as an expressiblecontent ("Martin" 68).

This response is precisely what is elicited in Heart of Darkness. Insteadof entering into a ght with Kurtz, Marlow leaves him in his radicalalterity; he establishes a relationship of proximity and distance, simul-taneously taking responsibility for Kurtz and respecting his difference,acknowledging the responsibility for the other individual he cannotbut assume, and yet granting Kurtzas a consequenceabsoluteexteriority to his own egoic desires. This relationship is intimatelyconnected in Conrad (as in Levinas) to language, to saying, specicallyto Kurtz's runic utterance, "The horror! The horror!" (100). Marlownotes explicitly that Kurtz's last utterance is the reason why he has

"remained loyal to Kurtz to the last" (Conrad 101).In order to see precisely how a connection between Marlow and

Kurtz is formed, let us return to Conrad's text and Kurtz's last words.One way of initiating the discussion is to ask what Kurtz's phrasemeans. InJoseph Conrad and the Modern Temper Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan argues that a profound metaphysical urge drives Marlow toAfrica. He seeks to "get at 'the truth of things'" and ultimately torestore the lost "essential wholeness" of humanity (Erdinast-Vulcan92). Since Kurtz is the aim of this pilgrimage and "the horror" is,

according to Marlow, Kurtz's summing up, perhaps this utterancecan be seen as the metaphysical insight he seeks. This reading isconrmed by Marlow's characterization of this statement as Kurtz'srevelation of a "glimpsed truth," a term heavily freighted with meta-physical connotations.


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But what sort of metaphysical insight does this statement pro-vide? Here, the early work of Levinas can provide some suggestiveanswers. For Levinas too, horror is a crucial register of phenomeno-

logical experience and knowledge. In Existence and Existents heattempts to describe "an existence where horror is the dominantemotion" (55). What is the nature of that existence? According toLevinas "the rustling of the there is . . . is horror" (55). The "thereis" (il y a) is "the phenomenon of impersonal being: 'it.'" Explicitlyopposed to the German there ises gibtwhich Heidegger (becauseof the use of the verb geben, which signies "to give") understood toreveal generosity and plenitude, Levinas insists on the "impersonal-ity of the 'there is''there is' as 'it rains,' or 'it's night.' And there is

neither joy nor abundance: it is a noise returning after every nega-tion of this noise." In order to further illustrate "this horrible thing"Levinas turns to a number of examples: it is the horror one discoversin the depths of insomnia, the "rumbling silence" one hears when"one puts an empty shell close to the ear, as if the silence were anoise" (Ethics48).

But nally it is in literature that he nds the clearest accountsof the "there is." He refers to the novels of Maurice Blanchot whereBlanchot writes of the "'hustle-bustle' of being, of its 'clamor,' its'murmur.' A night in a hotel room where, behind the partition, 'itdoes not stop stirring'; 'one does not know what they are doing nextdoor'" (Ethics 50). Further:

Like the unreal, inverted city we nd after an exhaustingtrip, things and beings strike us as though they no longercomposed a world, and were swimming in the chaos oftheir existence. Such is also the case with "fantastic,""hallucinatory" reality in poets like Rimbaud, even whenthey name the most familiar things and the most accus-tomed beings. The misunderstood art of certain realisticand naturalistic novelists, their prefaces and professionsof faith notwithstanding, produces the same effect: beingsand things that collapse into their "materiality," are terrify-ingly present in their destiny, weight and shape. Certainpassages of Huysmans or Zola, the calm and smiling hor-ror of de Maupassant's tales do not only give, as is some-times thought, a representation "faithful to" or exceedingreality, but penetrate behind the form which light revealsinto that materiality which, far from corresponding to the

philosophical materialism of the authors, constitutes thedark background of existence. (Existence5455)


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A condition (or pre-condition) of chaos, contradiction, disorder, andemptiness, the "there is" underlies the placid orderly surfaces ofeveryday life only to be glimpsed in moments of solitude, exhaus-

tion, or strain.The relevance of this dark vision to Conrad's novel is self-evi-

dent. The text repeatedly shows us a world that is out of jointnota cosmos of determinate laws and precise chains of causation, but amonster of incoherence and impenetrability. Traveling to the interiorshortly after arriving in Africa, Marlow notes:

I watched the coast. Watching a coast as it slips by theship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is beforeyousmiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, orsavage, and always mute with an air of whispering, "Comeand nd out." This one was almost featureless, as if stillin the making, with an aspect of monotonous grimness.The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green to be almostblack, fringed with white surf ran straight like a ruled line,far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred bya creeping mist. (19)

The natural surroundings are hostile, inscrutablethe coast is shownas a menacing, anthropomorphic thing, hidden by darkness andmist. Reality is painted in the bizarre chiaroscuro of a hallucinationor nightmare.

Should we not see in this bizarre, disordered universe the op-erations of the Levinasian "il y a?" Narrated to the men on the Nellieafter his encounter with Kurtz, Marlow's story shows the inuenceof Kurtz's dark metaphysical vision. With "the horror," Marlow hasbeen inducted into an understanding of being as founded on the"there is." This reading stands in contrast to Erdinast-Vulcan's claimthat the novel thematizes the "failure of metaphysics" (91).Whileit indeed undermines the notion of metaphysics as "ultimate foun-dation," perceived as a "return to a primary state of wholeness," itrearticulates metaphysics as in turn founded on the paradoxical andhorric eld of being, "an impersonal eld, a eld without proprietoror master, where negation, annihilation, and nothingness are eventslike afrmation, creation and subsistence, but impersonal events. Apresence of absence, the there isis beyond contradiction; it embracesand dominates its contradictory" (Existence60).

This interpretation helps to clarify certain aspects of Marlow's

language use. Some commentators have expressed dissatisfactionwith Conrad's rhetoric and have considered it an artistic failing of thebook. For example, E. M. Forster has noted that Conrad "is misty inthe middle as well as in the edges . . . the secret casket of his genius


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contains a vapour rather than a jewel" (13435). F. R. Leavis hascondemned Conrad's "adjectival insistence" and his attempt to "im-pose on his readers and on himself . . . a 'signicance' that is merely

an emotional insistence on the presence of what he can't produce."He concludes that "the insistence betrays the absence, the willed'intensity,' the nullity. He is intent on making a virtue of not knowingwhat he means" (180). Although Forster and Leavis may be correct intheir descriptions of the text, they may have missed Conrad's intent.Conrad's ambiguity is a studied technique that questions and under-cuts the picture of a universe with secure coordinates and absolutereference points. What emerges in its stead is the chaotic world (ornon-world) of the "il y a," a world that throws a kind of ominous light

on darkness itself:

you ought to know how I got out there, what I saw, how Iwent up that river to the place where I rst met the poorchap. It was the farthest point of navigation and the culmi-nating point of my experience. It seemed to throw a kindof light on everything about meand into my thoughts. Itwas somber enough tooand pitifulnot extraordinary inany waynot very clear either. No, not very clear. And yetit seemed to throw a kind of light. (11)

The equivocation and mingling of supposedly opposite categories ofanalysis in this passage is not a matter of sloppy writing or confu-sion, but a presentation of a world that has lost its clarity and dis-tinctness.

But in spite of its importance as metaphysical insight, the crucialaspect of "the horror" is not its status as a constative truth claim.Indeed, in other parts of the text Conrad problematizes and desta-bilizes this status. Although Kurtz's words are putatively presentedas imparting essential or absolute knowledge, this essentialism is

undercut by other textual movements. First, Kurtz is stripped of hisstatus as The Word, as the all seeing, all-knowing deity. Marlow nowsees him as "an atrocious phantom" (85), a "pitiful Jupiter" (86),and claims that "Mr. Kurtz was no idol of mine" (84). Marlow admitsthat he "had been robbed of belief" (68). Instead of the insight thatMarlow had been expecting, he receives from Kurtz "an immense

jabber, silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or simply mean, without anykind of sense" (69). Kurtz is nally "[a] voice. He was very little morethan a voice" because he is not overowing with content, but "hollow

at the core" (69, 83).Second, the novella is quite explicit in its discussion of the failureof language, of its inability to convey meaning. Marlow states that "itis impossible to convey the life sensation of any given epoch of one's


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existencethat which makes its truth, its meaningits subtle andpenetrating essence. It is impossible. We live as we dreamalone."Just before that Marlow says: "He was just a word for me. I did not

see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him?Do you see the story? Do you see anything?" (39). There is nothingto see but the story itselfthe words on the page or the movementof the speaker's lipsbecause there is always a gap between wordsand things, between the signier and what is signied.10

If the constative function of language is displaced from its posi-tion of primacy, what is the signicance of "the horror?" An answercomes in an allusive moment very early in the novella when theframe narrator says: "to him [Marlow] the meaning of an episode

was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale whichbrought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness ofone of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by thespectral illumination of moonshine" (8). How are we to understandthis characterization of discourse or narration? Once again, Levinasgives us the concepts with which to interpret this difcult passage.In Ethics and Innityhe notes that "in discourse I have always dis-tinguished, in fact, between the sayingand the said" (88). The saidrefers to the informational content of an utterance, its character as aconstative truth claim. And while this constative function is importantfor Levinas"that the sayingmust bear a saidis a necessity of thesame order," he argues, "as that which imposes a society with laws,institutions and social relations" (88)he also notes that "for me, thesaid does not count as much as the saying." For Levinas, the sayingis important "less through its informational contents than by the factthat it is addressed to an interlocutor" (42). The crucial fact is that"before the face I do not remain there contemplating it, I respondto it" (88). This pulls language out of the sphere of knowledge andinto the eld of ethics:

The saying is a way of greeting the Other, but to greet theOther is already to answer for him. It is difcult to be silentin someone's presence; this difculty has its ultimate foun-dation in this signication proper to the saying, whatever isthe said. It is necessary to speak of something, of the rainand ne weather, no matter what, but to speak, to respondto him and already to answer for him. (88)

This distinction between the saying and the said also informs Marlow's

philosophy of language. As the unnamed narrator tells us, for him thesignicance of a tale is not its insideits meaning or truth-valuebutits outsideits performance or telling. Language is not primarily im-portant because of the constative statements that it is able to make,


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but as utterance addressed to the Other. The fundamental importanceof "the horror," then, is not as a site of existential truth, but of ex-posure, vulnerability, and openness to an Other. "The horror" allows

Marlow to experience the approach of alterity and to recognize hisprimordial and exorbitant responsibility to it.

Marlow and the Intended

All of the elements of this move beyond the violence of theMaster-Slave dialectic are also in evidence in the second recognitionscene that Conrad stages: the meeting between Marlow and theIntended. As Marlow studies a picture of the Intended and considersthis meeting, he imagines her as a quintessentially ethical agent. Henotes, "She seemed ready to listen without mental reservation, with-out suspicion, without a thought for herself" (104). Rejecting egoisticnarcissism, Marlow's imagined Intended embraces alterity and thediscourse of the Other. The real Intended, however, turns out to bequite different. Conrad shows us that she is as deeply involved in thequest for recognition and mastery as Kurtz. Throughout the meetingshe constantly tries to dominate both Kurtz and Marlow. She presentsherself as the custodian of Kurtz's memory, his ofcial spokesman,

the one who "knew him best" (107). However, we can easily see thatshe is not a spokesman but a ventriloquist, not speaking for Kurtzbut through him. She reveals her true interests when she exclaims:"Ah, but Ibelieved in him more than any one on earthmore thanhis own mother, more than himself. He needed me! Me! Iwould havetreasured every sigh, every word, every sign, every glance" (100,emphasis mine). What interests the Intended is not Kurtz in himself,but Kurtz in the role he plays in her symbolic universe, Kurtz as anobject that will fulll her needs, lacks, and desires. Describing herdiscourse on Kurtz, Marlow notes that she "talked as thirsty mendrink," continuing the use of tropes of ingestion that we saw previ-ously in Marlow's references to Kurtz, references that, interestingly,Alexander Kojve uses in his discussion of the Hegelian Master.11

It is interesting to note that the Intended's narcissistic ranthas more than a passing similarity to Kurtz's own narcissistic list ofpossessions and conquests. Not only does she speak for Kurtz, butshe also tries to act as ventriloquist for Marlow. At one point in themeeting she cuts him off and quite literally puts her own words in hismouth: "'It was impossible not to' 'Love him,' she nished eagerly,

silencing me into an appalled dumbness" (107). Elsewhere, she talksof Kurtz using "we," co-opting Marlow to her sentiments. At one pointshe even makes a statement on behalf of "the world." Further, sheworks in the register theorists like Jacques Lacan refer to as the scopic


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as well as the vocative register: Marlow makes numerous references,for example, to the xity of her gaze.12

Marlow initially reacts to her defensively. In response to her

attempts at domination he employs a bitter and aggressive irony.Responding to her comment that "'he [Kurtz] died as he lived,'" Mar-low remarks acidly that "'his end,' said I, with dull anger stirring inme, 'was in every way worthy of his life.'" But in the very next linehis position changes. Marlow notes that "my anger subsided beforea feeling of innite pity" (110). Marlow abandons his aggressive pos-ture and assumes a position of openness and responsibility. Marlowexperiences here what Levinas has referred to as the asymmetry ofthe ethical relationship. In an interview with the philosopher, Phillipe

Nemo asks, "But is not the Other also responsible in my regard?"Levinas responds:

Perhaps, but that is his affair. One of the fundamentalthemes of Totality and Innityabout which we have notyet spoken is that the intersubjective relation is a non-symmetrical relation. In this sense I am responsible forthe Other without waiting for reciprocity were I to die forit. Reciprocity is his affair. It is precisely insofar as the rela-tionship between the Other and me is not reciprocal that I

am subjection to the Other; and I am "subject" essentiallyin this sense. It is I who support all. (Ethics98)

Rejecting any expectation of reciprocal ethical regard, the subjectassumes a primordial responsibility for the Other. The locus of thisresponsibility is the Face. Although the Other can be approached asan object of knowledge, an authentic relationship with the Face "isstraightaway ethical":

There is rst the very uprightness of the face, its upright

exposure, without defense. The skin of the face is that whichstays most naked, most destitute. It is the most naked,though with a decent nudity. It is the most destitute also:there is an essential poverty in the face: the proof of thisis that one tries to mask this poverty by putting on poses,by taking on a countenance. The face is exposed, menaced,as if inviting us to an act of violence. At the same time, theface is what forbids us to kill. (86)

Remarkably, these are almost exactly the terms in which Marlow

describes the Intended. She approaches him not as a fully embodiedbeing, but essentially as a face. "She came forward," notes Marlow,"all in black, with a pale head, oating towards me in the dusk. . . .This fair hair, this pale visage, this pure brow, seemed surrounded by


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an ashy halo from which the dark eyes looked out at me. Their glancewas guileless, profound, condent, and trustful" (106). Despite herattempts at mastery, it is destitution, weakness, and vulnerability

that Marlow reads in the face of the Intended and that inspires in hima profound empathy. Or should we call his attitude something else?Levinas argues that "the encounter with the Other is my responsibil-ity for him. That is the responsibility for my neighbor, which is, nodoubt, the harsh name for what we call love of one's neighbor; lovewithout Eros, charity, love in which the ethical aspect dominates thepassionate aspect, love without concupiscence. . . . That is the visionof the Face, and it applies to the rst comer" (Entre10304). Is thisnot precisely what Marlow means when he notes: "I concluded I would

go and give her back her portrait and those letters myself. Curious-ity? Yes; and also some other feelings perhaps" (104)? Pierced byhis feelings of loving responsibility, Marlow abandons his aggressiveposture towards the Intended and accepts the non-symmetrical ethi-cal obligation it entails. He does not devastate her by telling her the"truth" about Kurtz's last words. Instead, at the last minute, Marlowtakes responsibility for her, and respecting her radical alterity, tellsher a story that allows her to maintain her otherness: "The last wordhe pronounced was your name" (110).

But does this decision not itself pose a huge ethical problem?As Andrew Michael Roberts has observed, "there is another suppres-sion, as well as Marlow's lie to her about Kurtz's last words: the sup-pression by the text of the name (her name) which he pretends hadbeen those last words. Marlow's lie also associates her (unspoken)name with the idea of horror" (127). If, as Jeremy Hawthorn hasargued, the novel is at pains to point out the ways in which construc-tions of femininity and domesticity are implicated in the ideology ofimperialism, by propping up these constructions, does not Marlowforsake the oppressed and throw his lot in with their imperialist op-

pressors? Perhaps not. Marlow discusses his lie to the Intended interms of its justice.This is an issue that also repeatedly concernedLevinas. Discussing the negotiation of responsibility and justice thephilosopher notes:

How is it that there is justice? I answer that it is the fact ofthe multiplicity of men and the presence of someone elsenext to the Other, which condition the laws and establish

justice. If I am alone with the Other, I owe him everything;but there is someone else. Do I know what my neighbor

is in relation to someone else? Do I know if someone elsehas an understanding with him or his victim? Who is myneighbor? It is consequently necessary to weigh, to think,to judge, in comparing the incomparable. The interpersonal


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relation I establish with the Other, I must also establishwith other men; there is thus a necessity to moderate theprivilege of the Other; from whence comes justice. Justice,

exercised through institutions, which are inevitable, mustalways be held in check by the initial interpersonal relation.(Ethics9091)

While the face-to-face encounter with the Other and the ethos ofresponsibility it entails is primary, it must also be held in tense dia-logical balance with a responsibility to all others. A point of negotia-tion must be found between singularity and multiplicity, individualityand sociality.

This, I believe, is one of the key issues explored in the novel'svery complex frame tale, a layer of the narrative that brilliantly bringstogether all of the concerns I have been tracing in this essay. WhenMarlow returns from Africa he is in a bad state: bitter, antagonistic,and disillusioned.

I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting thesight of other people hurrying through the streets to lcha little money from each other, to devour their infamouscookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream theirinsignicant and silly dreams. They trespassed on mythoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life isan irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they couldnot possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, whichwas simply the bearing of commonplace individuals goingabout their business in the assurance of perfect safety, wasoffensive to me like the outrageous auntings of folly inthe face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had noparticular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difcultyin restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of

stupid importance. (102)

Here Marlow rails against the smug complacency of bourgeois society.But by the time he tells his tale aboard the Nelliehe is associatingwith the very pillars of the society he hatesan accountant, a lawyer,a director of companiesall people who are radically other than theway he would imagine himself to be in their ignorance of the heartof darkness.

Why are they other? There are at least two answers to thisquestion. First, Marlow's descriptions of Brussels after his return

from Africa are not only colored by a newly critical attitude to society,but they are also tainted with metaphysical resonances that call tomind the hallucinatory and nightmarish characteristics of the "there


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is," particularly the visions of an "unreal, inverted city we nd afteran exhausting trip" noted by Levinas. In the passage quoted above,Marlow presents himself as profoundly alone in his experiences, as

cut off from others and locked into his own disturbed interiority. Butas Levinas argues, "to escape from the 'there is' one must not beposed but deposed; to make an act of desposition in the sense onespeaks of deposed kings. This deposition of sovereignty by the egois the social relationship with the Other, the dis-inter-ested relation."Marlow's attempts at reconciliation with the nave and unenlightenedmembers of his society demonstrate a parallel recognition that onlythrough "responsibility to the Other, being-for-the-other" can one"stop the anonymous and senseless rumbling of being" and effect a

"deliverance from the 'there is'" (Ethics52).Further, Conrad demonstrates that language, the power of the

saying, is the proper medium for this reconciliation with the Other.When Marlow begins his story the frame narrator shows mild annoy-ance as he says in a patronizing tone: "we were fated, before the ebbbegan to run, to hear about one of Marlow's inconclusive experiences"(10). At times, this tension breaks out into open hostility:

"I felt often its mysterious stillness watching me atmy monkey tricks, just as it watches you fellows performing

on your respective tight-ropes forwhat is it? half-a-crowna tumble" "Try to be civil, Marlow," growled a voice, and I knewthere was at least one listener awake besides myself. "I beg your pardon. I forgot the heartache whichmakes up the rest of the price. And indeed what does theprice matter, if the trick be well done? You do your tricksvery well." (49)

So, the group on the Nellieis fractured and divided: the seamen think

that Marlow is a tiresome windbag, and Marlow thinks that they arepompous bourgeois swine. However, as Marlow tells his story thepower of his narrative brings them together. At one point the framenarrator comments on the strength of Marlow's tale:

It had become so pitch dark that we listeners could hardlysee one another. For a long time already he, sitting apart,had been no more to us than a voice. There was not aword from anybody. The others might have been asleep,but I was awake. I listened, I listened on the watch for the

sentence, for the word, that would give me the clue to thefaint uneasiness inspired by this narrative that seemed toshape itself without human lips in the heavy night-air ofthe river. (39)


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With the coming darkness, the group moves fully from what I, fol-lowing Lacan, have labeled above as the "scopic" to the vocativeregister, and by the end of the narrative that move has affected a

considerable change:

Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent in thepose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time."We have lost the rst of the ebb," said the Director, sud-denly. I raised my head. The ofng was barred by a blackbank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to theuttermost ends of the earth owed sombre under an over-cast skyseemed to lead into the heart of an immensedarkness. (111)

Marlow is no longer the windbag with "inconclusive experiences," heis now the wise Buddha. Furthermore, the Director's comment revealsthat they have been sitting, entranced enough to miss the turn of thetide that they had been waiting for. The narration has brought andkept them together, it has made them into a kind of community.

But there is another aspect to this scene that relates to theissue of justice I broached above. While it is the saying that bringscommunity together, the said is crucial as well. As the frame narra-tor tells us, Marlow's story has allowed them to glimpsethe heartof darkness. It has revealed to them the cruelties and idiocies thatMarlow has witnessed in Africa. As Marlow argues earlier in thenarrative, "I hear; I admit, but I have a voice, too, and for good orevil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced" (52). If the ethicalimperatives of the face-to-face encounter dictated that the Intendedbe left undisturbed in her otherness, the ethical imperatives of jus-tice demand that Marlow bear witness to the catastrophic horrors ofimperialism and Kurtz's implication in the catastrophe. And this dutyMarlow fulls assiduously, even obsessively, offering his testimony to

the functionaries of Empire least likely to appreciate his revelationof the truth.

Beyond Dialectic

In Heart of DarknessJoseph Conrad shows us a way out of theabyss to which the appropriation of the Hegelian Master-Slave dia-lectic as a perspective on the world would lead us. In Hegel's darkvision of interpersonal relations violence is inescapable. At the scene

of recognition, when two subjects face each other, the only possibleoutcome is the victory of one and the annihilation of the other. Thetotalization of one egoic perspective over the other, the domination


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of one with regard to the other, and the elimination of genuine al-terityof the other's real otherness with regard to mereign overhuman interaction. Reading Conrad through Levinas, we can see that

the dominion of violence and sameness by which Conrad imaginesEuropean imperialism is not unshakeable or inevitable. It is possibleto move beyond the dialectic in the way we conceive of Europeanand perhaps human history. By rejecting both elements of the dia-lectical opposition and afrming instead respect, alterity, and radicalresponsibility on the part of each toward the other, it is possible torearticulate interpersonal relations in such a way that justice, asLevinas imagines it, remains a viable goal.

Notes

1. See Hegel in Miller's translation, 1977. My reading of Hegel in whatfollows is heavily indebted to Alexandre Kojve's.

2. On the inuence of Hegel (as read through Kojve) on Sartre andLacan, for example, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes287, 345347.

3. For the classic discussion of literary formalism in connection withConrad, see Ian Watt. For a discussion of mythical structures in thenovel, see Lillian Feder.

4. After the lecture Achebe's piece was published as "An Image ofAfrica" in the Massachusetts Review, 18 (1977): 78294. It wassubsequently revised for the 1988 third Norton Critical Edition ofthe novel (25162). It appears in the current Fourth Edition withdiscrepancies between the two versions given in notes (33649).

5. Changed to "thoroughgoing racist" in the edited version.

6. While this section was eliminated in the revised version of the essay,Achebe's subsequent statements show that he did not change his

view on the proximity of Conrad's racism to Nazi anti-Semitism. In a2000 interview, when denying the value of Conrad's novel, he notedthat "I've not encountered any good art that promoted genocide"(Jaggi 6). For a more extended discussion of racism in Conrad, seeHunt Hawkins, 36566, 374.

7. See Singh, Torgovnick, and Taussig. These are, of course, only a fewindicative examples. The literature on this issue is vast with manysubtle differences in perspective. The interested reader is referred tothe essays in the Fourth Norton Critical Edition of Heart of Darknessfor a sample of approaches to the novel.

8. See Fridman. Other recent studies that have used Conrad's text asa model for confronting historical trauma include Ferida Durakovic,Jacques Paw, and Shari Turitz.


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9. All page references to Heart of Darknessrefer to the Penguin edi-tion.

10. This is underscored symbolically by another passage. When Marlowrst arrives in Africa he encounters a native in the "grove of death."In describing him Marlow states: "He had tied a bit of white wor-sted round his neckWhy? Where did he get it? Was it a badgeanornamenta charma propitiatory act? Was there any idea at allconnected with it? It looked startling around his black neck, this bitof white thread from beyond the seas" (25). Marlow's list is strik-ingly similar to a passage found in Jacques Derrida's Limited Inc, anexamination of which will, I believe, help to clarify the issue of failedreference.

Derrida considers "I forgot my umbrella," a strange isolated phrase

found in the unpublished writings of Nietzsche. What does the phrasemean; to what does it refer? Derrida concludes that "[a] thousandpossibilities will always remain open even if one understands some-thing in this phrase that makes sense (as a citation? the beginning ofa novel? a proverb? someone else's secretarial archives? an exercisein learning language? the narration of a dream? an alibi? a crypticcodeconscious or not? the example of a linguist or a speech acttheoretician letting his imagination wander for short distances, etc.?"(Derrida 63). According to Derrida it is impossible to x denitivelythe meaning of this phrase. The problem lies not in the peculiarityof the phrase, in its lack of explanation or elaboration, but in the

nature of language itself. A necessary characteristic of language, orany signifying system, is what Derrida calls "iterability": its abilityto signify in the absence of that which it signies"the possibility ofits being repeated in the absence not only of its 'referent,' which isself-evident, but in the absence of a determinate signied or of theintention of actual signication, as well as of all intention of presentcommunication." However, while iterability, the "structural possibilityof being weaned from the referent or the signied," is that whichmakes signication possible, it also makes it impossible (10). If asignier is able to break with the original context of its inscription orenunciation, then what is to prevent this from happening all the time?

Derrida notes that "[e]very sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spokenor written . . . can break with every given context, engendering aninnity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable.This does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, buton the contrary that there are only contexts without any center orabsolute anchoring" (12). By introducing radical indeterminacy intosignication, iterability breaks the closed circuit of reference. Withthe connection between words and things broken, language becomesa free-oating structure.

11. For more on this, see Kojve.

12. See Jacques Lacan's The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanaly-sis for more on the register of the scopic.


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Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa." The Massachusetts Review.18

(1977): 78294.Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnog-raphy, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Markham: Penguin, 1980.. Heart of Darkness. 4th ed. Ed. Paul B. Armstrong. New York:

Norton, 2006.Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1990.Durakovic, Ferida. Heart of Darkness. Fredonia, NY: White Pines, 1998.Erdinast-Vulcan.Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper. Oxford: Clar-

endon Press, 1991.Feder, Lillian. "Marlow's Descent into Hell." Nineteenth-Century Fiction

9 (1955): 28092.Forster, E. M. "Joseph Conrad: A Note."Abinger Harvest. 1936. Harmond-sworth: Penguin, 1967. 13640.

Fridman, Lea Wernick. Words and Witness: Narrative and AestheticStrategies in the Representation of the Holocaust. Albany: State Uof New York P, 2000.

Hegel, Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford:Oxford UP, 1977.

Hawkins, Hunt. "Heart of Darknessand Racism." Conrad. Ed. Armstrong.36575.

Jaggi, Maya. "Storyteller of the Savannah: Prole of Chinua Achebe." The

Guardian18 Nov. 2000. 6.Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes. Berkeley: The U of California P, 1993.Kojve, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Ithaca: Cornell

UP, 1969.Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans.

Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1981.Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition. 1948. London: Chatto, 1979.Levinas, Emmanuel. Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other. Trans. Michael

B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia UP, 1998.. Ethics and Innity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Trans.

Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquense UP, 1992.

. Existence and Existents. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh:Duquense UP, 2001.

. The Levinas Reader. Ed. Sean Hand. Cambridge: Blackwell,1994.

. "Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge." Levinas Reader.5974.

. "Time and the Other." Levinas Reader. 3758.. Totality and Innity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquense

UP, 1969.Paw, Jacques. Into the Heart of Darkness: Confessions of Apartheid's

Assassins. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1997.

Roberts, Andrew Michael. Conrad and Masculinity. New York: St. Martin's,2000.

Singh, Frances. "The Colonialistic Bias of Heart of Darkness." Conradiana10 (1978): 4154.


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Taussig, Michael. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study inTerror and Healing. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives.

Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.Turitz, Shari ed. Confronting the Heart of Darkness: An International

Symposium on Torture in Guatemala. Proc. of Guatemala HumanRights Commission, Nov. 1992, Washington, DC. USA: GuatemalaHuman Rights Commission, 1993.

Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: U of CaliforniaP, 1979.

Documents

Junyk, Beyond the Dialectic