Excerpt from

“Heart of Darkness Revisited”

J. Hillis Miller, University of California, 1983

in Murfin, Ross, ed. Heart of Darkness: Case Study in Contemporary Criticism, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

    I begin with three questions: Is it a senseless accident, a result of the crude misinterpretation or gross transformation of the mass media that the cinematic version of Heart of Darkness is called Apocalypse Now, or is there already something apocalyptic about Conrad's novel in itself? What are the distinctive features of an apocalyptic text? How would we know when we had one in hand?

…There is another reason beyond the necessities of revelation for this structure. The truth behind the last witness, behind Kurtz for example in Heart of Darkness, is, no one can doubt it, death, “the horror”; or, to put this another way, “death” is another name for what Kurtz names "the horror." No man can confront that truth face to face and survive. Death or the horror can only be experienced indirectly, by way of the face and voice of another. The relay of witnesses both reveals death and, luckily, hides it. As Marlow says, “the inner truth is hidden—luckily, luckily” (p. 49). This is another regular feature of the genre of the apocalypse. The word “apocalypse” means “unveiling,” “revelation,” but what the apocalypse unveils is not the truth of the end of the world which it announces, but the act of unveiling. The unveiling unveils unveiling. It leaves its readers, auditors, witnesses, as far as ever from the always “not quite yet” of the imminent revelation—luckily. Marlow says it was not his own near-death on the way home down the river, “not my own extremity I remember best,” but Kurtz’s “extremity that I seem to have lived through.” Then he adds, “True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible. Perhaps!” (p. 87). Marlow, like Orpheus returning without Eurydice from the land of the dead, comes back to civilization with nothing, nothing to bear witness to, nothing to reveal but the process of unveiling that makes up the whole of the narration of Heart of Darkness. Marlow did not go far enough into the darkness, but if he had, like Kurtz he could not have come back. All the reader gets is Marlow’s report of Kurtz’s last words, that and a description of the look on Kurtz’s face: “It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair” (p. 85).

I have suggested that there are two ironies in what Marlow says when he breaks his narration to address his auditors directly. The first irony is the fact that the auditors see more than Marlow did because they see Marlow, whom they know; the second is that we readers of the novel see no living witness. (By Marlow’s own account that is not enough. Seeing only happens by direct experience, and no act of reading is direct experience. The book’s claim to give the reader access to the dark truth behind appearance is withdrawn by the terms in which it is proffered.) But there is, in fact, a third irony in this relay of ironies behind ironies in that Marlow’s auditors of course do not see Marlow either. It is too dark. They hear only his disembodied voice. “It had become so pitch dark,” says the narrator, “that we listeners could hardly see one another. For a long time already he, sitting apart, had been no more to us than a voice.” Marlow’s narrative does not seem to be spoken by a living incarnate witness, there before his auditors in the flesh. It is a “narrative that seemed to shape itself without human lips in the heavy night-air of the river.” This voice can be linked to no individual speaker or writer as the ultimate source of its messages, not to Marlow, nor to Kurtz, nor to the first narrator, nor even to Conrad himself. The voice is spoken by no one to no one. It always comes from another, from the other of any identifiable speaker or writer. It traverses all these voices as what speaks through them. It gives them authority and at the same time dispossesses them, deprives them of authority, since they only speak with the delegated authority of another. As Marlow says of the voice of Kurtz and of all the other voices, they are what remain as a dying unanimous and anonymous drone or clang that exceeds any single identifiable voice and in the end is spoken by no one: “A voice. He was very little more than a voice. And I heard—him—it—this voice—other voices—all of them were so little more than voices—and the memory of that time itself lingers around me, impalpable, like a dying vibration of one immense jabber, silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or simply mean, without any kind of sense. Voices, voices—…” (p. 63).

For the reader, too. Heart of Darkness lingers in the mind or memory chiefly as a cacophony of dissonant voices. It is as though the story were spoken or written not by an identifiable narrator but directly by the darkness itself, just as Kurtz’s last words seem whispered by the circumambient dusky air when Marlow makes his visit to Kurtz's Intended, and just as Kurtz himself presents himself to Marlow as a voice, a voice which exceeds Kurtz and seems to speak from beyond him: “Kurtz discoursed. A voice! a voice! It rang deep to the very last. It survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence the barren darkness of his heart” (p. 84). Kurtz has “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” (p. 62). Kurtz has intended to use his eloquence as a means of “wringing the heart of the wilderness,” but “the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion” (p. 73). The direction of the flow of language reverses. It flows from the darkness instead of toward it. Kurtz is “hollow at the core” (p. 73), and so the wilderness can speak through him, use him so to speak as a ventriloquist's dummy through which its terrible messages may be broadcast to the world: “Exterminate all the brutes!” “The horror!” (pp. 66, 85). The speaker to is spoken through. Kurtz’s disembodied voice, or the voice behind voice behind voice of the narrators, or that “roaring chorus of articulated, rapid, breathless utterance” (p. 83) shouted by the natives on the bank, when Kurtz is taken on board the steamer—these are in the end no more direct a testimony of the truth than the words on the page as Conrad wrote them. The absence of a visible speaker of Marlow’s words and the emphasis on the way Kurtz is a disembodied voice function as indirect expressions of the fact that Heart of Darkness itself is words without person, words which cannot be traced back to any single personality. This is once more confirmation of my claim that Heart of Darkness belongs to the genre of the parabolic apocalypse. The apocalypse is after all a written not an oral genre, and, as Jacques Derrida has pointed out, one characteristic of an apocalypse is that it turns on the invitation or “Come” spoken or written always by someone other than the one who seems to utter or write it.

A full exploration of the way Heart of Darkness is an apocalypse would need to be put under the multiple aegis of the converging figures of irony, antithesis, catachresis, synecdoche, aletheia, and personification. Irony is a name for the pervasive tone of Marlow’s narration, which undercuts as it affirms. Antithesis identifies the division of what is presented in the story in terms of seemingly firm oppositions that always ultimately break down. Catachresis is the proper name for a parabolic revelation of the darkness by means of visible figures that do not substitute for any possible literal expression of that darkness. Synecdoche is the name for the questionable relation of similarity between the visible sign, the skin of the surface, the foam on the sea, and what lies behind it, the pulsating heart of darkness, the black depths of the sea. Unveiling or aletheia labels that endless process of apocalyptic revelation that never quite comes off. The revelation is always future. Personification, finally, is a name for the consistent presentation of the darkness as some kind of living creature with a heart, ultimately as a woman who unmans all those male questors who try to dominate her. This pervasive personification is most dramatically embodied in the native woman, Kurtz’s mistress: “the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul” (p. 76).

Heart of Darkness is perhaps most explicitly apocalyptic in announcing the end, the end of Western civilization, or of Western imperialism, the reversal of idealism into savagery. As is always the case with apocalypses, the end is announced as something always imminent, never quite yet. Apocalypse is never now. The novel sets women, who are out of it, against men, who can live with the facts and have a belief to protect them against the darkness. Men can breathe dead hippo and not be contaminated. Male practicality and idealism reverse, however. They turn into their opposites because they are hollow at the core. They are vulnerable to the horror. They are the horror. The idealistic suppression of savage customs becomes, “Exterminate all the brutes!” Male idealism is the same thing as the extermination of the brutes. The suppression of savage customs is the extermination of the brutes. This is not just word play but actual fact, as the history of the white man's conquest of the world has abundantly demonstrated. This conquest means the end of the brutes, but it means also, in Conrad’s view of history, the end of Western civilization, with its ideals of progress, enlightenment, and reason, its goal of carrying the torch of civilization into the wilderness and wringing the heart of the darkness. Or it is the imminence of that end which has never quite come as long as there is someone to speak or write of it…