Counter-Images of Europe in the Utterances of Selected Characters in Conrad's African Fiction
Joanna Kurowska, University of Chicago
In 1977 Chinua Achebe accused Joseph Conrad of not conferring, in his Heart of Darkness, the facility of language on the 'rudimentary souls of Africa'. In place of speech the Africans in the novel make 'a violent babble of uncouth sounds' (Achebe 115).1 They speak intelligibly only twice. One of the instances is when Marlow approaches Kurtz's inner station. As the natives from the shore attack the ship, Marlow initiates a conversation with the black headman of his crew. For 'good fellowship's sake', he says: 'Aha!' The headman replies: 'Catch 'im. Give 'im to us'. Marlow asks: 'To you, eh? What would you do with them?' The headman answers: 'Eat 'im!' (HD 103).
According to Achebe, the fact that, exceptionally, in this conversation the headman uses English constitutes one of Conrad's greatest racist assaults (115). Allegedly, Conrad makes the African speak English only to enable the Western reader to glimpse the barbarism – or, as Achebe (paradoxically) puts it, 'the unspeakable cravings of [the African] hearts' (ibid.). Peter Firchow has convincingly argued that, while defending a noble cause, Achebe ignores the broader context of Conrad's narrative. For example, he disregards Conrad's use of contrast. As a result, he overlooks many important details, for instance the reverse symmetry between the sick men crawling on all fours in the grove of death, and Kurtz crawling on all fours 'out of his own choice' (cf. Firchow 39).
Indeed, the English utterances of the natives in Heart of Darkness seem to grow in significance when one considers them in the light of Conrad's employment of contrast. Before exploring that significance, it may be worthwhile to juxtapose the utterances of Conrad's African characters to those appearing in other contemporary adventure novels. For example, in King Solomon's Mines, Haggard describes an encounter between the Englishman Quatermain and the Zulu Umbopa. Quatermain initiates a conversation by asking the Zulu patronisingly.
'Well, ... what is your name?' A moment later he addresses Umbopa: 'Why do you ask whither we go? What is it to thee?' The Zulu replies: 'It is this, O white men, that if indeed you travel so far I would travel with you'. (265)
Haggard does not inform the reader in what tongue the conversation takes place but nowhere in the narrative does he suggest that his English characters speak any African language.2 Compared to the headman's 'snaps' in broken English, Umbopa's utterances strike the reader as grammatically and stylistically elaborate.
Considering that both men use a language foreign to them, the headman's short, fractured sentences are more realistic than Umbopa's high-flown, rounded utterances. The outcomes of the two conversations are also strikingly different. The laconic communication of the headman makes Marlow reflect that the men of his crew are starving. For his part, Quatermain reminds the Zulu of his racial inferiority: 'You forget yourself a little.... That is not the way to speak' (265).
In Heart of Darkness Conrad employs precisely that contrast between the flowery language of the Europeans and the brief, awkward, fractured, and yet extremely precise and unambiguous utterances of his Africans. As if exemplifying Conrad's own oxymorons included in the description of the 'immense forests ... [that] lay in the eloquent silence of mute greatness' ('An Outpost of Progress' 94), the semantic force and precision of the utterances of the characters in Heart of Darkness grow counter-proportionally to the volume and grandiosity of the language those characters use. The headman with whom Marlow speaks uses eight words altogether to convey both the message that he and his men are hungry and a solution to the problem. His utterance also suggests that his white 'employers' have mistreated him and his men, which undermines Marlow's initial declaration of 'good fellowship'.
The second instance of the use of English by the Africans occurs when the manager's boy 'puts his insolent black head in the doorway' and says 'in a tone of scathing contempt': 'Mistah Kurtz – he dead' (150). Despite the brevity and incompleteness of that sentence (it lacks the predicate), it conveys its message with superb precision. The nonverbal aspects of the boy's utterance – his insolence and contempt – contrast with Kurtz's seeming politeness and compassion, which in fact disguise his arrogance and contempt.
Again, the most important aspect of the contrast between the utterances of the Africans and those of the whites is their employment of language. The narrative's insistence on presenting the lavishness and grandiosity of Kurtz's language is remarkable. Marlow's main aim in pursuing Kurtz is talking with him. Kurtz's 'gift of expression' (113; 147) is playfully described as both 'bewildering' and 'illuminating', 'the most exalted' and 'the most contemptible' (113-4). As Bonney has observed, while describing Kurtz's use of language, Marlow 'must invalidate the very act of defining in order to demonstrate through his own linguistic activity the supposed qualities of Kurtz's speech' (138). That speech is rendered paradoxically as either a 'pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of impenetrable darkness' (113-14). Its very illumination turns it into darkness.
Considering that 'all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz' (117), the narrative locates the 'heart of darkness' within Kurtz's mind as well as at the core of European discourse that he articulates. In Lord's words, Heart of Darkness 'documents the transformation of civilised ideals into words that stand alone, divorced from a meaningful relation with their referent' (61). Kurtz's wordy, elaborate, moving, elegant, pretty – and meaningless3 – utterances are the exact opposite of those of the Africans. To Kurtz, language 'serves ... as a vehicle, metaphor, and paradigm of the pretences and deceptions of colonial expansion' (Lord 67); whereas the headman and the servant boy restore the straightforwardness of language in communicating needs and identifying facts.
Characteristically, looking back, Marlow remembers Kurtz's and the other Europeans' utterances (including the utterances of Kurtz's Intended) as 'one immense jabber, silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or simply mean, without any kind of sense' (115). This stays in contrast with Marlow's lasting memory of – characteristically – nonverbal message conveyed to him by his dying helmsman: 'the intimate profundity of [his] look ... remains to this day in my memory – like a claim of distant kinship affirmed in a supreme moment' (119).
As Peters observes, let loose in Africa Kurtz 'finds nothing underlying [his] ideals and nothing to enforce them, and hence they have no power over his life' (56). Considering the manifest discrepancy between 'words and their referent' in the Europeans' use of language, Lord asks: Does this mean that the ideals and values of European civilisation, which those words pronounce, are merely nominal? Or are they substantial? (cf. 61). Conrad's employment of contrast in juxtaposing Kurtz's use of language with that of the Africans suggests a restoration of at least one value: sincerity of expression.
Apparently, the Africans retain a value that the Europeans – including Marlow, Conrad, and Conrad critics – recognise as their own. For example, Andrea White argues that 'it was possible for someone in Conrad's unique position to see ... the disparity between the [imperial] discourse and the actuality of grabbing 'for the sake of what could be got' (184). To be able to notice a disparity one must have a notion of a norm, in this case the norm of concurrence between sign (language) and referent (reality).4 Consequently, Heart of Darkness reveals the moral bankruptcy of European civilisation of which language is merely a mask, and therefore it is also bankrupt. On the other hand, as Lord argues, the novella reflects Conrad's struggle to save meaning.5