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Colonizers, Cannibals, and the Horror of Good Intentions in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness - Critical Essay
Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1997 by Carola M. Kaplan
Man can embody truth but he cannot know it." Nowhere is William Butler Yeats's adage more clearly illustrated than in the narrative of Charlie Marlow in Heart of Darkness. Throughout the text, Marlow insists upon the distinction between truth and lies; between men and women; between civilization and savagery; and, most of all, between Self and Other. Of these, the most important distinction is between Self and Other, for it is this opposition that sustains the colonial enterprise. The lure and the fear of the Other initiate the pursuit and "discovery" of colonialism; the conviction of the inferiority of the Other justifies the undertaking. Yet despite Marlow's insistence, all binary oppositions collapse in the course of his narrative: colonists prove to be conquerors, the gang of virtue is indistinguishable from the gang of greed, the illusions of women merely echo the illusions of men, and there is no clear distinction between lies and truth. Most importantly, the fundamental difference between Self and Other disappears and, with it, the unbridgeable gulf between men and women and between savage and civilized that sustains the power structure of western civilization. But this awareness offered by the text eludes Marlow for, enmeshed in his own culture, he would find this awareness "too dark--too dark altogether."
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In psychological terms, the Other is but the undiscovered territory in the self. In the colonial enterprise, this territory of the unconscious is displaced onto another people who both allure and terrify. The colonizer, fearing to succumb to the Other, attempts to contain it--through subordination, suppression, or conversion. These strategies of containment are designed to preserve the opposition and inequality between Self and Other that justifies the imperialist enterprise. The central trope of imperialism is what Abdul R. JanMohamed terms "the manichean allegory" that converts racial difference "into moral and even metaphysical difference" (80). This allegory characterizes the relationship between dominant and subordinate culture as one of ineradicable opposition (82). Although the opposing terms of the allegory change--good and evil, civilization and savagery, intelligence and emotion, rationality and sensuality--they are always predicated upon the assumption of the superiority of the outside evaluator and the inferiority of the native being observed.
Colonialist literature, as byproduct of the imperialist enterprise, necessarily reinscribes the manichean allegory either to confirm or to interrogate it in an effort to move beyond its limits. As a result, colonialist texts take two forms, which reflect, respectively, these two different responses: the "imaginary" and the "symbolic" (JanMohamed 84). These designations derive from Jacques Lacan's descriptions of sequential stages of human development. The "imaginary," according to Lacan, dates from the mirror stage of infant life, in which the child of six to eighteen months jubilantly identifies itself with its mirror image, the wholeness and integrity of which belie the internal flux and fragmentation the child experiences (Lacan 4). Because of the unbridgeable distance of the specular image with which the child identifies, the child situates within it rivalry, opposition, and aggressivity (Gallop 59). The relation between the self and its image, which Lacan terms "the imaginary," is one in which mirroring forestalls intersubjectivity or the interaction between two separate selves, each with its own distinct perspective.
In the "imaginary" colonialist text, JanMohamed observes, "the native functions as an image of the imperialist self in such a manner that it reveals the latter's self-alienation" (84). This self-alienation consists in the failure to recognize as inherent within the self despised attributes the imperialist projects onto the Other. Thus, the "imaginary" colonialist text adheres to a fixed opposition between the self and the native, insisting upon the homogeneous identity of the indigenous population and taking refuge in the "superior," more "enlightened," and more "civilized" perspective of the dominant culture. Interpreted through the narrative perspective of Marlow, Heart of Darkness exemplifies the "imaginary" colonialist text.
The second type of colonialist fiction, the "symbolic," parallels the stage at which the young child, once having become convinced of its wholeness and integrity, is able to recognize and identify with an imago or subject-image as a counterpart; and is then able to enter into a dialectic that links the self or I "with socially elaborated situations" (Lacan 5). At this stage, the child is able to enter into social exchange, dialogue, and relationship (Gallop 59-61). An equivalent stage in culture would make possible a dialectic encounter between Self and Other in which the dominant culture is able to bracket its own values and thus radically to question its basis for cultural inference and interpretation. Such a dialectic or exchange would aim at resolving cultural oppositions through syncretic solutions (JanMohamed 85). Such, I would argue, is the larger narrative perspective of Heart of Darkness, which exposes the limitations and self-contradiction of Marlow's views to open up a complex dialogue on issues of history, culture, race, and gender. Thus the entirety of Heart of Darkness attempts to deal with the Other in symbolic terms, although Marlow is able to deal with the other only in the realm of the Imaginary.
