The Centennial Review Enclosure, Darkness, and the Body: Conrad's Landscape

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ENCLOSURE, DARKNESS, AND THE BODY: CONRAD'S LANDSCAPE Author(s): Zohreh T. Sullivan Source: The Centennial Review , WINTER 1981, Vol. 25, No. 1 (WINTER 1981), pp. 59-79 Published by: Michigan State University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23739719 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

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ENCLOSURE, DARKNESS, AND THE BODY: CONRAD'S LANDSCAPE Zohreh T. Sullivan

THE SPATIAL MOVEMENT WITHIN THE LANDSCAPE of Joseph Con

rad's Heart of Darkness reveals a double metaphoric pattern The basic configuration first seen in his earliest novels, Alma er's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, includes the sea, a dark river with a settlement near its mouth, and a jungle up the river. In Heart of Darkness, however, this larger spatial geog phy contains within it yet another metaphoric landscape — that of a journey into the interior of an engulfing snake — a journey described in language highly charged with sexual meaning. Th connection between the body and the landscape has long bee an accepted psychological premise.1 Because the mother's bod is the embryonic landscape and infant environment, the adult perception of subsequent landscapes is significantly colored b his relationship to that primary one.2 Man's fear of certain kind of fertile or foetal landscapes, such as forests or swamps, ha frequently been perceived as a projection of buried hostility towards sexuality and the female in particular. I would like t suggest that Conrad's landscapes reflect internal conflicts and

lApart from the mythic, anthropological, religious, and literary elaborations on th

image of the Earth Mother, documented in such studies as Erich Neumann's Th Great Mother (New York: Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press, 1955), C. Jung's Symbols of Transformation, Vol. 2 (New York: Harper Torchbooks/The Bolli gen Library, 1956), and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1953), the psychological study of the subject must descend where all ladder start with Sigmund Freud's A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (Garden City

N.Y.: Doubleday, 1952) in which he distinguished between concave female symbols th enclose a space, and male convex symbols that do the reverse. For other wörks that include a study of the sexuality of landscape see Paul Shepard, Man in the Landscap A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), L Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), an Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land (Chapel Hill: The University of North Ca lina Press, 1975). Frederick Crews in Out of My System (New York: Oxford Universit

Press, 1975), describes the plot of Heart of Darkness as a journey into the maternal bod

by a dreamer "preoccupied by the primal scene, which he symbolically interrupt (p. 56). 2See Shepard, pp. 98-104.

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THE CENTENNIAL REVIEW

ambivalences and that the struggles he portray

and jungle correspond symbolically to repres

the feminine matrix in general.'1 The sea, the river and the jungle — each incr destructive and feminine — serve as progres the repressed unconscious that threatens to dis

masculine autonomy of the European abroad wards such alien territory, Conrad and his ad aware of the dubious promise of each stage o

his autobiographical memoir The Mirror o

recalls the loss of his "awed respect of the earl

ually grows to learn of the duplicity of the

appropriately called "the Nursery of the Craft

Mediterranean as the "cradle of oversea traffic" that has "shel

tered the infancy of his craft."4 In spite of Conrad's yearning for

the maternal ambience of the sea perceived here as "a vast

nursery in an old, old mansion where innumerable generations of his own people have learned to walk" (M, 148), his image of the sea becomes most threatening when it is discovered to be sexually promiscuous: My conception of its magnanimous greatness was gone. And I looked upon the true sea — the sea that plays with men till their hearts are broken, and •¡Thomas Moser in Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1957) and Bernard C. Meyer in Joseph Conrad: A Psychoanalytic Biog raphy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967) have in different ways focused on Conrad's misogyny. Conrad is not unique in his fear of women which has been docu mented as a basic part of the male psyche; for the most comprehensive study of the sub ject see Wolfgang Lederer, M.D., The Fear of Women (New York: Grune & Stratton,

1968); see also Karl Stern, The Flight from Woman (New York: The Noonday Press, 1965), Erich Neumann, The Origins and Flistory of Consciousness (Princeton. Prince ton University Press, 1954), J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, Abridged Ed. (London, Macinillan & Co, 1950), pp. 211-220, Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers (New York, Rinehart & Co, 1955), Montague Summers, The History of Witchcraft (New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1956). Karen Horney identifies the two major fears of men about women to be the fear of male genital inadequacy and the fear of submersion; Lederer paraphrases these into two themes: "woman as a deep, dangerous and alluring space; and woman as the vessel that cannot be adequately filled by man" (Lederer, p. 232). Both these themes can be detected in Conrad's simultaneous attraction and revul sion from such foetal and fertile territories as sea, river and jungle. 4All quotations from Conrad's works are from the complete works (Garden City, New

York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1924). References will be included parenthetically in the text and abbreviated as follows: The Mirror of the Sea -M; Almayer's Folly -AF; An Outcast of the Islands -OI; "An Outpost of Progress" -OP; Heart of Darkness -HD. I begin this essay with The Mirror of the Sea because 1 want to suggest a continuity between Conrad's autobiography and fiction.

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CONRADS LANDSCAPE

wears stout ships to death. . . . Open to all and faithf its fascination for the undoing of the best. To love i no bond of plighted troth, no fidelity to misfortune, to long devotion. The promise it holds out perpetually only secret of its possession is strength, — the jealous

a man guarding a coveted treasure within his gate

The image of guarding treasure within gat and in keeping with earlier descriptions o

and heartless sea" (M, 136) that, nevertheless,

"to which men have always been prone to t

if its immensity held a reward as vast as itse

and beautiful on the surface, but sinister, orderly beneath the surface, the sea, in Con

and fiction, is presented with all the radical a the nurturing and destructive maternal figur

The river too is charged with some of th

as the sea, but it is always more squalid, cons tating in its effects on man and ship. The the estuary, as "open portal" inviting men to

in succumbing to its charm and promise su tation to infantile regression and to sexual

The estuaries of rivers appeal strongly to an adventu Their fascination, the attractiveness of an open porta promises every possible fruition to adventurous hop plorer of coasts to new efforts, ... It is wide open, s pitable at the first glance, with a strange air of myst about it to this very day. (M, 100-101)

The fulfilment of hopes at the mouth of suc

as the Thames, however, is only the positiv tive maternal image. Some pages later Con other docks whose appalling ugliness is re structive and devouring mother, the La Bel who destroys the adventurer unfortunate

into her embrace:

Wild horses would not drag from me the name of a certain river in the north whose narrow estuary is inhospitable and dangerous, and whose docks are like a nightmare of dreariness and misery. , . . Shut up in the desolate cir cuit of these basins you would think a free ship would droop and die like a

wild bird into a dirty cage. ... I have seen ships issue from certain docks

like half-dead prisoners from a dungeon, bedraggled, overcome, wholly dis guised in dirt, and with their men rolling white eyeballs in black and worried 61

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faces raised to a heaven which, in its smoky and

reflect the sordidness of the earth below. (M, 111)

As "mirror of the infinite" open to all,

most general metaphoric landscape for the al terrible yet beneficent, a violated harlot yet a seductive bringer of wisdom and truth.5 less ambivalent, with its devouring mouth

tecture, serves as an avenue to a more sens

destructive territory — the jungle. In movin to jungle, Conrad stresses his awareness an ing peril in each element — a fear dramati

of hostility, corruption and decay onto th trophobic landscapes of river and jungle. P

of these landscapes also projects Conrad

ness in the face of a nature that is absolutely to the male psyche. Its feminine architecture unplumbed depths, swamps and pits appear and disintegrate his very identity.6 In Con

phy, sea, river and jungle all contain the

scious, darkness and death, but whereas the s illusion of freedom, order and virility, the the jungle ensures the reverse. The adventu trol the uncertain sea within the secure, civil

"aristocracy of ships" (M, 130). Having en

«See Neumann, Origins and History of Consciousness, p. An Outcast of the Islands opens with a brief but significa promise of the sea of the past in contrast to the sordid and

"Like a beautiful and unscrupulous woman, the sea of t

smiles, irresistible in its anger, capricious, enticing, illogic

love, a thing to fear. ... Its cruelty was redeemed by th mystery, by the immensity of its promise, by the supre favour. . . . That was the sea before the time when the Fre muscle in motion and produced a dismal but profitable engineer tore down the veil of the terrible beauty in ord landlubbers might pocket dividends." This metaphor of co violation and of the white man as violator is structurally

tales.

^Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, pp. 177-78. As Neumann (and Jung) have observed: "For the ego and the male, the female is synonymous with the unconscious and the non-ego, hence with darkness, nothingness, the void, the bottom less pit . . . Mother, womb, the pit, and hell are all identical. . . . She threatens the ego with the danger of self-noughting, of self-loss — in other words, with death and

castration."

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CONRAD'S LANDSCAPE

the river, however, the ship is a prisoner, and into the un-aristocratic "two-penny-half-penn

in which Marlow sails into the Congo. As

observed, the metaphors for sea-going ships

idealized in terms of soaring and free sea-bird ships — tugboats, harbor boats, river steam in terms of "the lowliest, most ungainly and

creatures, the beetle".7 Nothing man make survive the jungle: instruments and nails ru ery and imported drainage pipes decay; ship

falls out of Marlow's steamer which becomes "a carcass of some

big river animal."8

The Conradian myth, then, as it reveals itself in his land scapes, involves a struggle for the survival of vulnerable, light, orderly male forces against destructive, chaotic, dark female powers. As his seaman moves away from the protection of the sea, through the corruption of the river and into the fatal em brace of the jungle, he risks damnation and death. Analogously, he moves from the threatening protection of the maternal to the peril of the sexual, from such primal and white maternal figures associated with the sea as the loving, sock-darning, apple

cheeked Mrs. Beard in "Youth," to Kurtz's magnificently black native mistress, a dream symbol embodying not only the soul

of the jungle but the white man's most repressed sexual fears.

The most striking connection between the fearsome aspects of Conrad's psychic geography — the unplumbed depths of the sea, the hidden perils of the river, and the darkness of the jun gle, is that all are impenetrable and impervious to normal vision and to forces of light. In short the most threatening words in

Conrad's descriptive vocabulary are blindness, darkness and

"C. R. Burgess, The Fellowship of the Craft (New York: Kennikat Press, 1976), p. 17. 8The ship is a heroic extension of the seaman's ego and is consequently sacred to sail ors whose "profanity" Conrad says never touches his ship: or if by some freak chance it did, he insists that "it would be lightly as a hand may, without sin, be laid in the way of kindness on a woman" (M, 136). Rather, the ship is cherished and loved as a nobler part of the self: "They . . . minister to onr self-esteem by the demand their qualities make upon our skill and their shortcomings upon our hardiness and endurance. . . . The love that is given to ships is profoundly different from the love men feel for every other work of their hands . . . because it is untainted by the pride of possession" (M, 134-6).

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blackness: "To see! to see! —this is the cravin

of the rest of blind humanity" (M, 87). Blindin

and darkness affect the vitality of the adve him to sightless impotence by transforming gess observes, "into something unrecognizab therefore, deadly."9

The terror of darkness and the unknown

lated to the male fear of the female as alien, hidden and irra

tional; the darkness of the jungle and its native women, then, is in part a nightmarish extension of every man's fear of self-loss and death that could result from the final journey into the black and bestial womb of the devouring mother.10 Underlying much of Conrad's terror of the sexuality of jungles, however, is a fear of

literal darkness and blackness. Joel Kovel has called blackness "the nuclear fantasy," a symbolic abstraction so deeply embedded

in the Western psyche that even before the 16th century the word "black" (as recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary) meant " 'Deeply stained with dirt; soiled, dirty, foul. . . . per taining to or involving death, deadly; baneful, disastrous, sinis

ter. . . . Foul, iniquitous, atrocious. . . .' "n Frantz Fanon has described the white man's projection of all inner evil springing

from "an inordinately black hollow" in "the remotest depth of the European consciousness"12; and Kovel believes: Whatever is forbidden and horrifying in human nature, may be designated as black and projected onto a man whose dark skin and oppressed past fit him to receive the symbol. . . . Spurred by the super ego, the ego designates the id, which is unseen, as having the quality that comes from darkness, as black. The id, then, is the referent of blackness within the personality (65 66). . . . And this too is blackness, perhaps the fantasy of blackness most familiar to everyone: the blackness of Night, the gentle bringer of rest as well as the condition of darkness and the fears thereof — fears of death, fears »Burgess, p. 49.

1(1 For more on the devouring "Terrible Mother," see Neumann. See also Tony Tan ner's splendid article, " 'Gnawed Bones' and 'Artless Tales' — Eating and Narrative in Conrad," in Joseph Conrad: A Commemoration, ed. Norman Sherry (New York, Barnes and Noble, 1976), pp. 17-36. In discussing the oral imagery of "Falk," Tanner writes: "The proximity of 'gnawed bones' and 'artless tales' is a reminder that we engorge the world in the form of food just as metaphorically we devour it with the other sense. . . and then disgorge it in the form of words ..." (25).

njoel Kovel, White Racism: A Psychohistory (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970),

p. 62. l2Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York, Grove Press, 1967), p. 188.

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CONRADS LANDSCAPE

of the return of projected monsters, fears about the r repressed.13

In his essay on "The Darkness" in Poets of Reality, Hillis Miller describes Conrad's view of civilization as the "metamorphoses of darkness into light ... a process of transforming everything unknown, irrational, or indistinct into clear forms, named and

ordered," and he proceeds to describe Conrad's view of sex as a "descent into the darkness of irrational emotion, the blurring

of consciousness or its extinction."14 White civilized man can

survive, Conrad would maintain, only by recognizing his de pendence on membership in a coherent male society, in the presence of, but otherwise apart from the irrational world of darkness and of women. Darkness can be contained by repres

sion and rejection ("Take me away. I am white! All white!"

screams Willems about to be damned to the dark passions of the native Aissa in the jungle (OI, 271), or attacked by viola tion, conquest and rape, as that practiced by the Eldorado Ex ploring Expedition, whose sole purpose in the Congo was to "tear treasure out of the bowels of the land." In either case, the

white man's reaction to the darkness as a fearsome other needs

to be seen partly as a psychological projection of dark and vio lent forces within himself that he has been trained to repress.

II

A brief glance at some of Conrad's early fiction will reveal pa terns which anticipate the spatial symbolism of Heart of Dark

ness. Conrad's first novel, Almayer's Folly is a "river tale" rather than a sea tale; the river Pantai in the novel both connects and

separates Western and Eastern cultures, a "muddy and ma odorous" confusion of realms, balanced between the light of the

open sea and the constriction and darkness of the jungle. It is the natural home of Almayer, who, caught between two worlds,

lacks the courage either to venture out upon the sea or pene trate into the heart of the interior. The central setting of hi WKovel, p. 92. 14HÍ1ÜS Miller, Poets of Reality (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 14.

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second novel, An Outcast of the Islands, i location: Almayer's trading post, where Li after his humiliation by Hudig. But for W for Almayer, the river is not a home but frontation with the alien values of darkness

with Almayer, Willems takes a canoe up th tributary after another only to find that "And he would recommence paddling with another opening, to find another deceptio

after several such attempts that he finds the to a clearing, to his first sight of the nati ultimately his disintegration and death. As a the river in Almayer's Folly and An Outcas

faintly prefigures the bewitching serpen

Darkness.

The most elaborate development of the association of the iungle with destructive sexuality and death is An Outcast of the

Islands, a detailed account of the disintegration of Peter Wil lems, alone in the jungle with the beautiful and demonic Aissa. If Aissa's beauty embodies the mystery of the forest, her passion ate and violent nature embodies its threat to the sanity of the European. As Willems prefigures Kurtz, Aissa in her pride and wild magnificence is a model for the native woman in Heart of Darkness. Lingard perceives her as a creation of her unnatural and threatening setting: "as if she had been made there, on the spot, out of the black vapours of the sky and of the sinister gleams of feeble sunshine that struggled, through the thicken ing clouds, into the colourless desolation of the world" (OI, 244).

She is "timorous and fearless. . . . with a fire of recklessness burn

ing in her eyes" (OI, 245), clearly a threat to all white men; even the great "King of the Sea," Lingard, is held "motionless, attentive and approving against his will . . . (as) . . . from her staring black eyes ... a double ray of her very soul streamed out in a fierce desire to light up the most obscure designs of his

heart" (OI, 246). It is necessary to stress that Aissa, like the na tive woman, is perceived with a double vision: objectively she is a figure of strength, grace and courage; subjectively she is made into a nightmarish projection of the turbulence of the 66

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CONRADS LANDSCAPE

European mind beneath its ordered surfa is later described as "the wild and stealt

longing to whisper out an insane secret — o heartrending, and ludicrous secrets; one of like monsters — cruel, fantastic, and mournful, wander about

terrible and unceasing in the night of madness" (OI, 253). And Willems, her "ragged, disfigured" lover, like Kurtz, gradually withers into a "tall madman making a great disturbance about something invisible; a being absurd, repulsive, pathetic, and

droll" (OI, 271).

As a manifestation of his meeting with the alien and the un known, Willems' confrontation with the jungle serves a dual function: it awakens him to new hopes and new desires, but it also initiates him to new fears, specifically to the fear of annihi lation, or what he describes as "the flight of one's old self" (OI, 69). Gradually he begins to envision his intoxication with Aissa

as a surrender of civilization itself to the forces of darkness.

Soon after she touches him for the first time, he has a moment of insight that foreshadows Kurtz's later death-bed vision of "the

horror:"

He had a sudden moment of lucidity — of that cruel lucidity that comes once in life to the most benighted. He seemed to see what went on within him, and was horrified at the strange sight. He, a white man whose worst fault till then had been a little want of judgement. . . ! He seemed to be sur rendering to a wild creature the unstained purity of his life, of his race, of his civilization. He had a notion of being lost amongst shapeless things that

were dangerous and ghastly. (OI, 80)

Willems later in the novel defines his greatest fear to be not of

death, but of a "glimpse into the unknown things, into those motives, impulses, desires he had ignored" (OI, 149), of "the horror of bewildered life where he could understand nothing and nobody around him; where he could guide, control, com prehend nothing and no one — not even himself" (OI, 149).

The horror then for Willems and for Kurtz is not so much the

evil that lies in the hearts of men (as some critics have assumed); it is, less precisely, the incapacitating bewilderment that results

from man's glimpse into the alien and the unknown, into the desires, passions, motives he has ignored and repressed in his waking life, and that terrorize and haunt him in the jungles of dream, passion, and darkness. 67

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Another important anticipation of the ju Heart of Darkness is "An Outpost of Prog about Kayerts and Carlier, ivory dealers le

terior of Africa, who gradually shed their ve

Deprived of the support of "civilized crow from homesickness to preoccupation and t "art," in the form of cheap novels, to slave to murder and suicide. The disintegration of

is due to the hollowness of their pretensio

to their isolation, and to their loss of membe

society. The jungle, however, becomes the

the alien force that finally undermines them

they were to the subtle influences of surr themselves very much alone, when sudden face the wilderness; a wilderness rendered incomprehensible by the mysterious glimp life it contained" (Tales of Unrest, OP, 89)

surrounded by the forest, perfectly represen

lation and bewilderment. Shortly after the

story in 1898, Conrad began Heart of Da collapse of pretentious claims to progress regression to something worse than savage

into madness are described directly in "An O indirectly and more chillingly in Heart of Ill

Heart of Darkness is Conrad's fullest and most complex use of

the structural pattern of a journey over an ocean and up a river into a jungle deep within a geographic interior. And here as elsewhere in Conrad, the pattern comes to symbolize a cluster of related anxieties: the white European male's fear of the dark races, his related fear of the alienness of woman, his terror of isolation and separation from "civilized crowds," his sense of the fragility of "civilized" values and the danger of their col lapse, and the fear of confronting the buried self. Marlow follows Kurtz across an ocean to "the mouth of the big river," thirty miles up the river to a trading station, two hundred miles cross 68

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CONRAD'S LANDSCAPE

country to another river station, and then f steamer to the "Inner Station" where he fin ual brother, mad and dying, and finally back to Europe again. Each stage of the journey

tion it has in Conrad's other work: the sea as the embodiment

of the simple and trusting faith of child-like experience, the

river as the entrance to alien worlds of chaos and disillusionment,

the jungle as the place of threatening confrontation with sav agery and sensuality, and the interior as the setting for encoun ter on the deepest level with alien forces both within and with

out. Behind this explicit spatial movement lies the implicit re gressive movement within the mother's body — the return to the beginning or the womb. But in Heart of Darkness, this structural pattern is overlaid by another metaphoric pattern which focuses and intensifies its meaning. This is the metaphor of the "immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast

country, and its tail lost in the depth of the land" (HD, 52). Much has been made of the presence in Heart of Darkness of the mythic pattern of the descent into the underworld, of the "night-journey," of the interplay of light and dark, of the mor

tuary imagery which appears throughout, and of other impor tant patterns in the work. But less attention has been paid to the extension throughout the story of the image of the snake and the closely related imagery of progressive enclosure, con striction, and claustrophobia. Much of the terror of the story stems from the fear it expresses of being swallowed alive, and many of the other undeniably important patterns in the book

are built on this fundamental one.

The symbolism of the devouring snake, like that of the jour ney over the sea, up a river, and into a jungle, with which it coincides in part, is archetypal. Psychoanalysts have customarily

interpreted the symbolism of the snake as phallic, because of its shape, its power to penetrate holes and crevices in the earth,

its power to swell or extend itself, and its ability to secrete a "magical" fluid. But in both fantasy and primitive rituals in which snakes appear, quite other properties are more frequently emphasized: the snake's flexibility, its power to encircle and coil, 69

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and its power to engorge its victims whole. argued that while the snake may have a phal pal levels of fantasy, its meaning on the mo of oral fantasy is feminine. Because of its pow

engulf, it suggests "the entangling, smoth mother who destroys the boundary betwee

ternal world and returns him to a quiescent st

The "horror" in Heart of Darkness is, in pa being engulfed by dark, serpentine, Dionysi which are opposed by light, bird-like, Apoll The journey into the interior of Africa is a

the belly of a snake. Fatally charmed by the mystery and power r

snake in the map, the river Congo, both K

journey through its interior to discover the te

and enclosed spaces and of unexplored territ

own psyches. As emissaries of light and as mem of virtue," they represent in their pre-Congo

rationality and progress of enlightened Eur

Europeans, they encounter in the Congo both a

savagery that violates them from without, a

potential for rapacity that violates them from

savagery is fundamentally feminine. Conrad inine and of the Unconscious is echoed not temporary psychologists as Schopenhauer and

in the later psychologists Jung and Neumann, linity with consciousness, femininity with ecst the traditional associations in mythology of the serpent, and the sea.17 By going ashore for

dance, Kurtz chooses to cross the boundary irrational. In so doing, he moves into a realm feminine, one that is anarchic, sensuous, dar bodied finally in that superb apparition o

hood who has caressed and consumed Kurtz.

isphilip Slater, The Glory of Hera (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 88. iBSee John Saveson's Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Moralist (Rodopi NV: Am sterdam, 1972) for a study of the influence on Conrad of such contemporary psycholo gists as Hartmann, Schopenhauer, and Spenser. "Neumann, The Great Mother, pp. 187, 207, 300-2; Jung, p. 252.

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CONRAD'S LANDSCAPE

Oppositions between the Apollonian and the Di tween Marlow and Kurtz, are prepared for early with contrasts between the "luminous" sea and t gloom" of the land within, between sky and ear snake; thus Marlow sees his curiosity about the C of a bird fascinated by a snake — "a silly little b

The symbolic connection between bird and sky, snak

is reinforced by the contrast between Marlow, t "followed the sea," who stuck by his ship, who re for the howl and the dance, and Kurtz, "the pam

of the wilderness," who had in fact embraced and been con

sumed by both the land and the jungle. Nightmare images of inwardness and enclosure accumulate with increasing intensity until they arrive at that moment of

"impenetrable darkness" when Marlow looks into the self

devouring soul of the dying Kurtz "as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never

shines" (HD, 149). The journey inwards is externalized in a

physical landscape that swallows and devours those susceptible to its power.

The confined spaces through which Marlow travels begin chronologically in the European "sepulchral city" whose "nar row and deserted street in deep shadows" leads him through a Kafkaesque series of doors and entrances to an inner "sanc tuary," the office of the company head who will soon send him

to the Congo. Observing "immense double doors standing pon derously ajar" (HD, 55), Marlow slips through one of "these cracks," and opens another door to find the two knitting women

guarding the entrance to what he perceives to be "the door of

Darkness." That the women and the innermost room are both

connected with death is made obvious not only by their con tinuous action of "knitting black wool as for a warm pall," but by Marlow's further recognition of their function as parcae knit

ting the fate of all who pass the last door; "Avel .... Morituri te salutant. Not many of those she looked at ever saw her again"

(HD, 57). Two other encounters in closed rooms follow this

one: the absurd meeting with the doctor who measures the out side of the crania of all who go "out there" although, as he ad 71

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THE CENTENNIAL REVIEW

mits, the changes take place inside; and the il aunt's drawing room, which like its occupant

of European civilization that though "out

truth" is soothing, a world of its own, "too b

But all these enclosed spaces and rooms ar ceptive, and suffocating; each contains wit serves to sustain and uphold its outward m The descent from the doors of darkness into the mouth of the

snake, from the city in Europe into the river in Africa, is a move ment both in time and out of time; in time, its movement re

flects a journey into the past and a return, a movement from light into darkness and again to light, from the sepulchral city, to the inner station, and a return to the city. Out of time, its pattern is static, a movement within different kinds of enclosed inner spaces — narrow streets, rooms, rivers, ships, jungles — a journey that takes place entirely within the unendingly dark and

serpentine body of the devouring snake, that merely changes its skin between the Thames and the Congo, but is otherwise

the same "infernal stream of immense darkness."

The first Congo incident recalled by Marlow is of the bloody death of his predecessor Fresleven. When Marlow arrives to step

"into his shoes," the grass growing through his ribs was tall enough to hide his bones. . . . the huts gaped black, rotting, all

askew within the fallen enclosure" (HD, 54). Such images of

black enclosures continue through the story. The outer station is set amongst "a waste of excavations," where Marlow physically descends into the landscape, attempts to avoid a "vast artificial hole" only to stumble into a "very narrow ravine, almost no more than a scar in the hillside" (HD, 65). Once inside, it seems to him that he "had stepped into the gloomy circle of some in ferno" which contained within itself "a wanton smash-up" of decaying machinery and dying natives: "Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees, leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair" (HD, 66). Emerging from this "grove of death," Marlow thinks he sees a dream vision of that miracle in white, the chief accountant. But the dream dissolves into nightmare as he perceives the inner hor 72

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CONRAD S LANDSCAPE

ror not only in the callousness of the accoun

of this sick person. . . . distract my attention. it is extremely difficult to guard against cler climate" HD, 69), but also in the fly- and dea which he is compelled to live for ten days.

Encircling and inward patterns appear not on in minor details such as the bullet hole in the forehead of the

middle-aged negro (HD, 71), the hole in the bucket trying to put out a fire (HD, 76), and in the more description of the hollow men given by the manager tral Station: "Men who come out here should have no

of the man significant of the Cen entrails."

This remark is echoed over and over in suggestions of empty body cavities. Marlow speculates about the "papier-mache Meph istopheles" that "if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt may be" (HD, 81). Kurtz, with his spherical head like an "ivory ball," is "hollow at the core" (HD, 131), and his "weirdly voracious" mouth looks as if he "wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth,

all the men before him" (HD, 134). Marlow's obsession with "rivets. ... to get on with the work — to stop the hole" can be seen not only as his attempt to hold his collapsing world to gether, but as an expression of his terror of the recurring night

mare image of circular spaces that threaten both his manhood and his sanity. Instead of rivets, however, there appears "an invasion, an infliction, a visitation" in the form of the Eldorado

Exploring Expedition, whose function it is to create more empty

hollows in the land: "to tear treasure out of the bowels of the

land" (HD, 87). Hollow space is threatening not only because it is void, empty, waste, and sterile, but because it can also be de vouring, enclosing, female space. Marlow's terror of space is implied even in his preoccupation with routine and "restraint": "Were we to let go our hold of the bottom, we would be abso lutely in the air — in space" (HD, 106). The threat of boundary loss, of mental and bodily breakdown,

is projected in Marlow's responses to a landscape that grows increasingly unstructured and claustrophobic as he moves closer towards the Inner Station. The two hundred miles between the

Outer and Central Stations is described as a labyrinthine "net 73

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work of paths spreading over the empty land

through burnt grass, through thickets, do

vines, up and down stony hills ablaze w

Appropriately, the Central Station is situa

surrounded by scrub and forest, with a pret mud on one side, and the three others enclos

of rushes" (HD, 72). The ambiguity of bou by the Station's "neglected gap" for a gat fence of rushes" prepares Marlow and his

creasing psychic ambiguity and strangeness a

second outpost. The faithless pilgrims appe inside a rotten fence" (HD, 76). A fire in him think that "the earth had opened to consume all that trash" (HD, 76). A sick A

cause of the fire leaves the station, "and the

a sound took him into its bosom again"

in the Central Station is seen as a "great w

exuberant and entangled mass of trunk

boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonligh invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of p ed, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep

us out of his little existence. ... A deadene splashes and snorts reached us from afar,

osaurus had been taking a bath of glitter in 86). This allusion to the ichthyosaurus is la low's analogy of going up the Congo being

to the earliest beginnings of the world" (

sense of being a wanderer on a "prehistoric e

planet," surrounded by coming travellers who travelling in the night gone, leaving hardly a

"prehistoric man" c could not rememb of the first ages, o sigh — and no mem

The disorienting effects of such timelessne other kinds of boundary loss. The outlines

to be blurred "as though she had been on

l8Because the snake is self-regenerating, both male and tionally also seen as a "threshold symbol" associated with with the undifferentiated chaos of the unconscious (see Sl

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CONRAD'S LANDSCAPE

ing" which in turn serves to intensify Marlow ment and loss: "The rest of the world was now

eyes and ears were concerned. Just nowhere swept off without leaving a whisper or a sh 102). Dwellings appear to be increasingly d journey towards Kurtz, who lives in a long d black holes gaping through its roof. Aroun "was no enclosure of any kind" though the rem to exist in the form of "half-a-dozen slim p

upper ends ornamented with round carve

This absence of distinction between inside and outside has been

interpreted by Tony Tanner as "a topographical projection of Kurtz's unshuttered consciousness. He has opened his mental

shutters too wide, and in the event he is the real cannibal in the

book . . . literally and metaphorically."19 Cannibalism — an extension of the metaphor of the engorging snake and of the effect, boundary loss — functions on several levels in the narrative. The jungle "consumes" Kurtz; Kurtz in turn consumes the original owners of the shrunken heads and wishes to devour the entire earth (" I had a vision of him on the stretcher, opening his mouth voraciously, as if to devour all the earth with all its mankind" HD, 155); the imperialistic pow ers whom Kurtz represents presumably want to "engorge the world and transform it into self."20 The structure of the narra tive itself, the tale within a tale, is also an expression of this cannibalistic theme. The first narrator, Marlow, and Kurtz, each parts of a divided self, each more demonic and fragmented than the other, each threatening his saner double's identity with the

lure of regression and annihilation — these enclosing tales pro vide yet another cannibalistic pattern for the story.

The movement into the center, to the Inner Station, is a female movement, a regression into the womb, a journey to wards not only the native woman, but towards Kurtz himself, who is imagined in sexually ambiguous terms: "an enchanted princess sleeping in a fabulous castle" (HD, 106). Similarly, the white men who inhabit outposts in the jungle are described as l»Tanner, p. 31.

20Ibid.

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"clinging to the skirts of the unknown." Th strange — had the appearance of being held spell" (HD, 95). The sexuality of penetrating, er into the heart of darkness," into a "preh "unknown planet" intensifies as the vague u a "madhouse" of wild, shrieking passion (HD low recognizes as part of his "accursed inhe and not understood: "The mind of man is cap — because everything is in it, all the past future" (HD, 96). The inward movement dow snake, "the devil-god of that river," ends in

where Kurtz, ensconced in his hut, is enveloped very warm and clammy." Struggling to pene

low feels as if they "had been buried miles cottonwool. It felt like it too — choking, wa 107). To the literal horror of the shrunken heads (which also en circle Kurtz) may be added the primal fear of shrinking which is associated with regression. As Slater points out, "The desire for, and fear of, a return to the womb, plays the major part in

the fantasies of shrinking which appear so frequently in folk lore. Alice in Wonderland is a striking example, and it is note worthy that most of the growing and shrinking in the story take place in the context of birth symbols — enclosed spaces with tiny

exits, narrow passageways, water."21 At the end of his journey inward, Marlow encounters fantasy representations of himself, shrunken and impaled. The pattern of enclosed, devouring spaces gradually contracts as it moves from the wilderness (the "woods. . . . like the closed

door of a prison,") to individual stations, to Marlow's encircled steamer, to Kurtz's encircled hut, and finally rests upon the image of Kurtz's round bald head: The wilderness had patted him on the head, and behold, it was like a ball — an ivory ball; it had caressed him, and — lo! — he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation. He was its spoiled and pampered favourite. (HD, 115) 2iSlater, p. 93.

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As our introduction to Kurtz (a leap in tim tually meets him in the narrative) this is a It begins expectedly with an image of the

who has become that which he seeks — ivory; ing on his metamorphosis into an embodimen

indulged child. Clearly the jungle here has

the function of the traditional witch-incubus but that of the

cannibal mother by caressing, embracing, consuming, and seal ing his soul to its own. From the jungle, Kurtz has learned to be appropriately devouring: " 'My ivory . . . my intended, my ivory,

my station, my river, my—' everything belonged to him. . . . Everything belonged to him — but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness

claimed him for their own" (HD, 116). Marlow soon receives the answer to his question not only in the

shrunken heads and the "unspeakable rites," but in the native

woman, a concrete embodiment of the "fascination of the abom

ination." Marlow looks upon her as the "image" of the "ten ebrous and passionate soul" of the "immense and colossal wilder ness" who is also "a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman. . . . savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent . . . ominous and stately in her deliberate progress" (HD, 135-136). It is the

effect of the white men, of Kurtz, that makes her break through her mask of dignified restraint. That she, in turn, symbolizes a

primal threat to civilization and its restraints is dramatized in her final gesture: Suddenly she opened her bared arms and threw them up rigid above her head, as though in an uncontrollable desire to touch the sky, and at the same time the swift shadows darted out on the earth, swept around on the river, gathering the steamer in a shadowy embrace. (HD, 136)

Her "uncontrollable desire to touch the sky" reflects a threat to the masculine principle, to the Apollonian order of civiliza tion, and appropriately, ominous shadows immediately dart out of the earth gathering Marlow's steamer in a fearsome "shadowy

embrace." The claustrophobia of this embrace unsettles Mar

low to such an extent that he feels as if he were "buried in a vast

grave full of unspeakable secrets. I felt an intolerable weight oppressing my breast, the smell of the damp earth, the unseen 77

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THE CENTENNIAL REVIEW

presence of victorious corruption, the dar trable night" (HD, 138). The wilderness, the native woman, and th

are external correlatives of an inward horror: "his soul was mad.

Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and,

by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad" (HD, 145). Kurtz's

horror is that of the isolated, solipsistic soul that has "kicked [itself] loose of the earth" and of the subsequent connection with

humanity, with civilization and its rules. It is of this paradox ical freedom that Marlow says: "I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet strug

gling blindly with itself" (HD, 145). And because the struggle is a "blind one conducted in an impenetrable darkness," it ends in a nightmarish moment of "craven terror — of an intense and

hopeless despair" (HD, 149). The Apollonian optimist who came out to the darkness believing in the white man's power for "good

practically unbounded" has been consumed by Dionysian mad ness, destructiveness, and despair, a process represented as grad ual movement into the labyrinthine interior of a snake. In his last moments, Marlow looks at him "as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines" (HD, 149), and after his death the pilgrims appropri ately bury him in "a muddy hole" (HD, 150).

Marlow returns from darkness to the sepulchral light of

Europe, but it is as if he has moved from one kind of death to another, from the land that swallowed Kurtz into his final end in a muddy hole, to the more enlightened grave of civilization represented by the "sombre and polished sarcophagus" that con tains within it Kurtz's Intended. Kurtz's shadow, "a shadow

darker than the shadow of the night, and draped nobly in the folds of a gorgeous eloquence," enters the Intended's "luminous and bedraped" house along with Marlow, and with the shadow comes "the stretcher, the phantom-bearers, the wild crowd of obedient worshippers, the gloom of the forests, the glitter of the reach between the murky bends, the beat of the drum, regular

and muffled like the beating of a heart — the heart of a con quering darkness" (HD, 155-6). Oppressed and trapped by her naivete and ignorance, by "that great and saving illusion that 78

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shone with an unearthly glow in the darknes of defending himself or her from its triump

and the Intended, no longer antithetical, image. As the Intended puts out her arms,

"a tragic and familiar Shade, resembling in t one, tragic also, and bedecked with powerless

bare brown arms over the glitter of the in stream of darkness" (HD, 160-1). The impl Marlow and the Europeans in general have ing with the threat of irrationality by d women. Both the Intended and the native "powerless charms") are finally recognized jected. The Intended is corrupted by Marlo

woman was by Kurtz. An empty and pathetic

a counterpart to Kurtz's dehumanized ivor bols of displaced and disembodied idealism. text is merely an extension of Marlow's n blurry visual, emotional, and technical di represented clear and inviolable boundarie

is returned to the frame story, a further bl as yet another boundary is made ambiguous —

first narrator and Marlow. Whereas the first narrator's innocence

had been revealed in his predominant use of light imagery to describe the early history of the Thames, his last words might easily be Marlow's: "the tranquil waterway leading to the utter most ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky — seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness" (HD, 162).

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