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 PressDOI: 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 Research Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

beyond the dialectic:

conrad, levinas, and the

scene of recognition

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 worthy aspiration I had ever had, the center of myself, the circle of my life, my own, my wife. . .

—Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Can we now, perhaps, find 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 so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance" (Totality 21). While Levinas refers to a situation of war, Charles Dickens, in the selection quoted above, allows us to glimpse the potential for the occurrence of that same profound violence 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 status of an object to be possessed, transforming her into an anonymous placeholder in a network of narcissistic needs and desires. Dickens alerts us to the simultaneous banality and profundity of this prosaic everyday violence: banal because it is so unspectacular, involving no bloodshed or armed conflict, merely the claims and demands of love or friendship; profound, precisely because of this banality, because of its constant, unremarked occurrence in the relationships that we value most highly.

In the Phenomenology of Spirit, in the section entitled "In-dependence and Dependence of Self Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage," 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 conflict resulting in the victory and valorization of one, the Master, and the subjection, the totalization, of the other, the Slave. Hegel's dark view of this encounter has had a profound effect on Western philosophical thought, particularly in the twentieth century.2 Is there a way beyond the demands of rec-ognition and the inevitable aggression to which it leads, or are we doomed to continually engage one another in this fashion? In his novella Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad directly confronts these issues. Instead of an ethos of violence, Conrad presents a revitalized ethics (although one conceived in a manner very different from that of Kant). In fact, I would like to suggest that Conrad is very close to the ethical thought of Emmanuel Levinas and that by approaching Heart of Darkness through Levinas the reader is opened to a decisive move 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 discussions of the novel over the past thirty years. For an earlier generation of critics, formal and stylistic matters, on the one hand, and Conrad's use of mythical narrative paradigms, on the other hand, comprised the major focus.3 Chinua Achebe's strident indictment of the novel in his Chancellor's Lecture at the University of Massachusetts, Am-herst on February 18, 1975 decidedly shifted the focus of criticism to what constituted in this view the text's questionable ethics of representation.4 In his speech and subsequent article Achebe un-ambiguously declared that "Conrad was a bloody racist" (Achebe 788).5 For Achebe, the thoroughgoing racism of the novel makes it 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 of the human race." Achebe underscores this critique with the coup de grâce of a historical analogy, comparing Conrad to "all those men in Nazi Germany who lent their talent to the service of virulent racism" (789).6 This perspective has been extremely influential, and while differing from Achebe in various ways, critics as diverse as Frances Singh, Marianna Torgovnick, and Michael Taussig have presented similar critiques of Conrad's novel.7

But if some have attempted to demonstrate the violent and colonialist character of the book, others have presented it in precisely the 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 difference that resists the pull to synthesis or totalization. For Clifford, Heart of 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 model for ethnographic research and representation: "Anthropology is still waiting for its Conrad" (96).

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

My reading of Heart of Darkness builds on these and other recent attempts to rediscover the moral core of Conrad's text. But it also takes these analyses in another direction. Conrad stages in effect two recognition scenes, both of which conclude very differently from that described by Hegel. Marlow's meetings with Kurtz and the Intended end not in the globalization of one perspective to the detriment of the other—which is to say, in domination and incorporation of the other into the same—but in the affirmation of alterity, respect, and responsibility.

Marlow and Kurtz

The entire narrative of Heart of Darkness seems to anticipate the first encounter. In his three-month stay at the Central Station Marlow 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 noise was left behind, the interminable miles of silence—and we crept on, towards Kurtz" (Conrad 53).9 Marlow's movement, however, is not only forward in space, but also back in time, to a primordial era and to an archetypal, mythological past:

Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. . . . We were wanderers on prehistoric earth, on the earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet . . . we were traveling in the night of the first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign—and no memories. (48–51)

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

Further, we can see that Marlow expects something significant from this meeting. For Marlow, Kurtz is not a human being, a creature of flesh and blood, but a voice: "I made the strange discovery that I had never imagined him as doing, you know, but as discoursing. I didn't say to myself, 'Now I will never see him,' or 'Now I will never shake him by the hand,' but, 'Now I will never hear him.' The man presented himself as a voice" (67). As a voice, Kurtz becomes The Word, a numinous being, a deity who will give Marlow fundamental knowledge or presence.

When he arrives at the station, however, Marlow encounters a very different Kurtz. Instead of The Word, or even a voice, Marlow finds a fallen man. Kurtz has "gone native." Away from the restraints of European civilization Kurtz finds 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 participating in "unspeakable rites" and adorning his hut with shrunken heads, not turned outward to serve as a warning, but inward so that he can contemplate and admire them (71). Initially committed to the "Sup-pression of Savage Customs," once in the wilderness Kurtz takes "high seat amongst the devils of the land" (70, 71). He sets himself up as a god with the "power to charm or frighten rudimentary souls into an aggravated witch dance in his honour" (72). However, by the time of the recognition scene Kurtz's seduction by the darkness has left him broken and shattered. When Marlow finds Kurtz in the jungle he has 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 fight. He notes that he "had some vague notion of fall-ing upon him and giving him a drubbing" (93). He even threatens to smash Kurtz's head in. But he does nothing of the kind. Even with Kurtz's weakened condition and his assured victory, Marlow avoids any conflict or struggle. Instead of dominating or enslaving Kurtz, Marlow helps him, supporting him as they walk down the hill to the cabin, Kurtz's bony hand clasped around his neck.

If Marlow does not enslave Kurtz, neither is he enslaved by him. Although Kurtz is in a weakened state, he still has the Hegelian Master's desire to swallow the entire world. Even though he is noth-ing more than a skeleton Marlow notes: "I saw him open his mouth wide—it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him" (85–86). When Kurtz intones "My Intended, my career, my station, my ideas," he cannot number Marlow among his possessions, his conquests (98). Unlike the harlequin, who is entirely under Kurtz's domination, Marlow maintains his distance, irony, and autonomy.

Marlow, then, abandons the anticipated Hegelian dialectical battle of mastery and slavery. Acknowledging Kurtz's degradation, he assumes radical responsibility for him. After Kurtz reveals the full extent of his fall, Marlow does not forsake him but affirms: "I did not betray Mr. Kurtz—it was written I should be loyal to the night-mare of my choice" and "I remained to dream the nightmare out to the end, and to show my loyalty to Kurtz once more" (100). This is evidenced by the responsibility Marlow takes for Kurtz's papers. He protects Kurtz's image, refusing to let his private correspondence fall into the wrong hands and rips the incriminating postscript from the report on the "Suppression of Savage Customs" before releasing it for publication.

How are we to understand this radical turn from dialectical violence 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, to ontology, Levinas articulates a world characterized by the slogan of "ethics as first philosophy." Levinas's meontology begins with the question: "But how can the same, produced as egoism, enter into relationship with an other without immediately divesting it of its alter-ity? What is the nature of this relationship?" (Totality 38). Levinas's answer is the face-to-face encounter. This is a relationship with the other 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 integrally maintained, and whose pathos is made of both this proximity and duality" (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 affirms both proximity and distance, negotiating connection and alterity.

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

The essence of the 'word' does not initially consist in its objective meaning or descriptive possibilities, but in the response that it elicits. The assertion is not true because the thought that it expresses corresponds to the thing or because it is revelatory of being. . . . The assertion is true when it realizes the reciprocity of the relation by eliciting a response and singling out an individual who alone is ca-pable of responding. This conception of truth has nothing in common with the static notion of truth as an expressible content ("Martin" 68).

This response is precisely what is elicited in Heart of Darkness. Instead of entering into a fight with Kurtz, Marlow leaves him in his radical alterity; 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 cannot but assume, and yet granting Kurtz—as a consequence—absolute exteriority to his own egoic desires. This relationship is intimately connected in Conrad (as in Levinas) to language, to saying, specifically to Kurtz's runic utterance, "The horror! The horror!" (100). Marlow notes 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 phrase means. In Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan argues that a profound metaphysical urge drives Marlow to Africa. He seeks to "get at 'the truth of things'" and ultimately to restore the lost "essential wholeness" of humanity (Erdinast-Vulcan 92). Since Kurtz is the aim of this pilgrimage and "the horror" is, according to Marlow, Kurtz's summing up, perhaps this utterance can be seen as the metaphysical insight he seeks. This reading is confirmed by Marlow's characterization of this statement as Kurtz's revelation 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 suggestive answers. For Levinas too, horror is a crucial register of phenomeno-logical experience and knowledge. In Existence and Existents he attempts to describe "an existence where horror is the dominant emotion" (55). What is the nature of that existence? According to Levinas "the rustling of the there is . . . is horror" (55). The "there is" (il y a) is "the phenomenon of impersonal being: 'it.'" Explicitly opposed to the German there is—es gibt—which Heidegger (because of the use of the verb geben, which signifies "to give") understood to reveal 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 discovers in the depths of insomnia, the "rumbling silence" one hears when "one puts an empty shell close to the ear, as if the silence were a noise" (Ethics 48).

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

Like the unreal, inverted city we find after an exhausting trip, things and beings strike us as though they no longer composed a world, and were swimming in the chaos of their existence. Such is also the case with "fantastic," "hallucinatory" reality in poets like Rimbaud, even when they name the most familiar things and the most accus-tomed beings. The misunderstood art of certain realistic and naturalistic novelists, their prefaces and professions of faith notwithstanding, produces the same effect: beings and things that collapse into their "materiality," are terrify-ingly present in their destiny, weight and shape. Certain passages 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 exceeding reality, but penetrate behind the form which light reveals into that materiality which, far from corresponding to the philosophical materialism of the authors, constitutes the dark background of existence. (Existence 54–55)

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A condition (or pre-condition) of chaos, contradiction, disorder, and emptiness, the "there is" underlies the placid orderly surfaces of everyday 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 joint—not a cosmos of determinate laws and precise chains of causation, but a monster of incoherence and impenetrability. Traveling to the interior shortly after arriving in Africa, Marlow notes:

I watched the coast. Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you—smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, "Come and find out." This one was almost featureless, as if still in the making, with an aspect of monotonous grimness. The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green to be almost black, fringed with white surf ran straight like a ruled line, far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist. (19)

The natural surroundings are hostile, inscrutable—the coast is shown as a menacing, anthropomorphic thing, hidden by darkness and mist. Reality is painted in the bizarre chiaroscuro of a hallucination or 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 Nellie after his encounter with Kurtz, Marlow's story shows the influence of Kurtz's dark metaphysical vision. With "the horror," Marlow has been inducted into an understanding of being as founded on the "there is." This reading stands in contrast to Erdinast-Vulcan's claim that the novel thematizes the "failure of metaphysics" (91). While it indeed undermines the notion of metaphysics as "ultimate foun-dation," perceived as a "return to a primary state of wholeness," it rearticulates metaphysics as in turn founded on the paradoxical and horrific field of being, "an impersonal field, a field without proprietor or master, where negation, annihilation, and nothingness are events like affirmation, creation and subsistence, but impersonal events. A presence of absence, the there is is beyond contradiction; it embraces and dominates its contradictory" (Existence 60).

This interpretation helps to clarify certain aspects of Marlow's language use. Some commentators have expressed dissatisfaction with Conrad's rhetoric and have considered it an artistic failing of the book. For example, E. M. Forster has noted that Conrad "is misty in the middle as well as in the edges . . . the secret casket of his genius

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contains a vapour rather than a jewel" (134–35). F. R. Leavis has condemned Conrad's "adjectival insistence" and his attempt to "im-pose on his readers and on himself . . . a 'significance' 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 knowing what he means" (180). Although Forster and Leavis may be correct in their 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 absolute reference points. What emerges in its stead is the chaotic world (or non-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 I went up that river to the place where I first met the poor chap. It was the farthest point of navigation and the culmi-nating point of my experience. It seemed to throw a kind of light on everything about me—and into my thoughts. It was somber enough too—and pitiful—not extraordinary in any way—not very clear either. No, not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of light. (11)

The equivocation and mingling of supposedly opposite categories of analysis 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 crucial aspect 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 presented as imparting essential or absolute knowledge, this essentialism is undercut by other textual movements. First, Kurtz is stripped of his status as The Word, as the all seeing, all-knowing deity. Marlow now sees him as "an atrocious phantom" (85), a "pitiful Jupiter" (86), and claims that "Mr. Kurtz was no idol of mine" (84). Marlow admits that he "had been robbed of belief" (68). Instead of the insight that Marlow had been expecting, he receives from Kurtz "an immense jabber, silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or simply mean, without any kind of sense" (69). Kurtz is finally "[a] voice. He was very little more than a voice" because he is not overflowing with content, but "hollow at the core" (69, 83).

Second, the novella is quite explicit in its discussion of the failure of language, of its inability to convey meaning. Marlow states that "it is impossible to convey the life sensation of any given epoch of one's

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existence—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live as we dream—alone." 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 nothing to see but the story itself—the words on the page or the movement of the speaker's lips—because there is always a gap between words and things, between the signifier and what is signified.10

If the constative function of language is displaced from its posi-tion of primacy, what is the significance of "the horror?" An answer comes in an allusive moment very early in the novella when the frame narrator says: "to him [Marlow] the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine" (8). How are we to understand this characterization of discourse or narration? Once again, Levinas gives us the concepts with which to interpret this difficult passage. In Ethics and Infinity he notes that "in discourse I have always dis-tinguished, in fact, between the saying and the said" (88). The said refers to the informational content of an utterance, its character as a constative truth claim. And while this constative function is important for Levinas—"that the saying must bear a said is a necessity of the same order," he argues, "as that which imposes a society with laws, institutions and social relations" (88)—he also notes that "for me, the said does not count as much as the saying." For Levinas, the saying is important "less through its informational contents than by the fact that it is addressed to an interlocutor" (42). The crucial fact is that "before the face I do not remain there contemplating it, I respond to it" (88). This pulls language out of the sphere of knowledge and into the field of ethics:

The saying is a way of greeting the Other, but to greet the Other is already to answer for him. It is difficult to be silent in someone's presence; this difficulty has its ultimate foun-dation in this signification proper to the saying, whatever is the said. It is necessary to speak of something, of the rain and fine weather, no matter what, but to speak, to respond to 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 the significance of a tale is not its inside—its meaning or truth-value—but its outside—its 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 importance of "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 his primordial and exorbitant responsibility to it.

Marlow and the Intended

All of the elements of this move beyond the violence of the Master-Slave dialectic are also in evidence in the second recognition scene that Conrad stages: the meeting between Marlow and the Intended. As Marlow studies a picture of the Intended and considers this meeting, he imagines her as a quintessentially ethical agent. He notes, "She seemed ready to listen without mental reservation, with-out suspicion, without a thought for herself" (104). Rejecting egoistic narcissism, Marlow's imagined Intended embraces alterity and the discourse of the Other. The real Intended, however, turns out to be quite different. Conrad shows us that she is as deeply involved in the quest for recognition and mastery as Kurtz. Throughout the meeting she constantly tries to dominate both Kurtz and Marlow. She presents herself as the custodian of Kurtz's memory, his official spokesman, the one who "knew him best" (107). However, we can easily see that she is not a spokesman but a ventriloquist, not speaking for Kurtz but through him. She reveals her true interests when she exclaims: "Ah, but I believed in him more than any one on earth—more than his own mother, more than himself. He needed me! Me! I would have treasured 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 an object that will fulfill her needs, lacks, and desires. Describing her discourse on Kurtz, Marlow notes that she "talked as thirsty men drink," continuing the use of tropes of ingestion that we saw previ-ously in Marlow's references to Kurtz, references that, interestingly, Alexander Kojève uses in his discussion of the Hegelian Master.11

It is interesting to note that the Intended's narcissistic rant has more than a passing similarity to Kurtz's own narcissistic list of possessions and conquests. Not only does she speak for Kurtz, but she also tries to act as ventriloquist for Marlow. At one point in the meeting she cuts him off and quite literally puts her own words in his mouth: "'It was impossible not to—' 'Love him,' she finished eagerly, silencing me into an appalled dumbness" (107). Elsewhere, she talks of Kurtz using "we," co-opting Marlow to her sentiments. At one point she even makes a statement on behalf of "the world." Further, she works 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 fixity 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 in me, 'was in every way worthy of his life.'" But in the very next line his position changes. Marlow notes that "my anger subsided before a feeling of infinite pity" (110). Marlow abandons his aggressive pos-ture and assumes a position of openness and responsibility. Marlow experiences here what Levinas has referred to as the asymmetry of the 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 fundamental themes of Totality and Infinity about which we have not yet spoken is that the intersubjective relation is a non-symmetrical relation. In this sense I am responsible for the Other without waiting for reciprocity were I to die for it. 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" essentially in this sense. It is I who support all. (Ethics 98)

Rejecting any expectation of reciprocal ethical regard, the subject assumes a primordial responsibility for the Other. The locus of this responsibility is the Face. Although the Other can be approached as an object of knowledge, an authentic relationship with the Face "is straightaway ethical":

There is first the very uprightness of the face, its upright exposure, without defense. The skin of the face is that which stays 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 this is 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, the face 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 embodied being, but essentially as a face. "She came forward," notes Marlow, "all in black, with a pale head, floating 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 glance was guileless, profound, confident, and trustful" (106). Despite her attempts at mastery, it is destitution, weakness, and vulnerability that Marlow reads in the face of the Intended and that inspires in him a 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, no doubt, the harsh name for what we call love of one's neighbor; love without Eros, charity, love in which the ethical aspect dominates the passionate aspect, love without concupiscence. . . . That is the vision of the Face, and it applies to the first comer" (Entre 103–04). Is this not 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 by his feelings of loving responsibility, Marlow abandons his aggressive posture 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, Marlow takes responsibility for her, and respecting her radical alterity, tells her a story that allows her to maintain her otherness: "The last word he 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 had been those last words. Marlow's lie also associates her (unspoken) name with the idea of horror" (127). If, as Jeremy Hawthorn has argued, the novel is at pains to point out the ways in which construc-tions of femininity and domesticity are implicated in the ideology of imperialism, by propping up these constructions, does not Marlow forsake the oppressed and throw his lot in with their imperialist op-pressors? Perhaps not. Marlow discusses his lie to the Intended in terms of its justice. This is an issue that also repeatedly concerned Levinas. Discussing the negotiation of responsibility and justice the philosopher notes:

How is it that there is justice? I answer that it is the fact of the multiplicity of men and the presence of someone else next 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 else has an understanding with him or his victim? Who is my neighbor? 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 establish with other men; there is thus a necessity to moderate the privilege of the Other; from whence comes justice. Justice, exercised through institutions, which are inevitable, must always be held in check by the initial interpersonal relation. (Ethics 90–91)

While the face-to-face encounter with the Other and the ethos of responsibility 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, individuality and sociality.

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

I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of other people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed on my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life is an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in 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 Nellie he is associating with the very pillars of the society he hates—an accountant, a lawyer, a director of companies—all people who are radically other than the way he would imagine himself to be in their ignorance of the heart of darkness.

Why are they other? There are at least two answers to this question. 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 to mind the hallucinatory and nightmarish characteristics of the "there

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is," particularly the visions of an "unreal, inverted city we find after an 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. But as Levinas argues, "to escape from the 'there is' one must not be posed but deposed; to make an act of desposition in the sense one speaks of deposed kings. This deposition of sovereignty by the ego is the social relationship with the Other, the dis-inter-ested relation." Marlow's attempts at reconciliation with the naïve and unenlightened members of his society demonstrate a parallel recognition that only through "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'" (Ethics 52).

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 ebb began 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 at my monkey tricks, just as it watches you fellows performing on your respective tight-ropes for—what is it? half-a-crown a tumble—" "Try to be civil, Marlow," growled a voice, and I knew there was at least one listener awake besides myself. "I beg your pardon. I forgot the heartache which makes up the rest of the price. And indeed what does the price matter, if the trick be well done? You do your tricks very well." (49)

So, the group on the Nellie is fractured and divided: the seamen think that Marlow is a tiresome windbag, and Marlow thinks that they are pompous bourgeois swine. However, as Marlow tells his story the power of his narrative brings them together. At one point the frame narrator comments on the strength of Marlow's tale:

It had become so pitch dark 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. There was not a word 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 the faint uneasiness inspired by this narrative that seemed to shape itself without human lips in the heavy night-air of the 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 vocative register, and by the end of the narrative that move has affected a considerable change:

Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. "We have lost the first of the ebb," said the Director, sud-denly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an over-cast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness. (111)

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

But there is another aspect to this scene that relates to the issue of justice I broached above. While it is the saying that brings community together, the said is crucial as well. As the frame narra-tor tells us, Marlow's story has allowed them to glimpse the heart of darkness. It has revealed to them the cruelties and idiocies that Marlow has witnessed in Africa. As Marlow argues earlier in the narrative, "I hear; I admit, but I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced" (52). If the ethical imperatives of the face-to-face encounter dictated that the Intended be left undisturbed in her otherness, the ethical imperatives of jus-tice demand that Marlow bear witness to the catastrophic horrors of imperialism and Kurtz's implication in the catastrophe. And this duty Marlow fulfils assiduously, even obsessively, offering his testimony to the functionaries of Empire least likely to appreciate his revelation of the truth.

Beyond Dialectic

In Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad shows us a way out of the abyss to which the appropriation of the Hegelian Master-Slave dia-lectic as a perspective on the world would lead us. In Hegel's dark vision of interpersonal relations violence is inescapable. At the scene of recognition, when two subjects face each other, the only possible outcome is the victory of one and the annihilation of the other. The totalization 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-terity—of the other's real otherness with regard to me—reign over human interaction. Reading Conrad through Levinas, we can see that the dominion of violence and sameness by which Conrad imagines European imperialism is not unshakeable or inevitable. It is possible to move beyond the dialectic in the way we conceive of European and perhaps human history. By rejecting both elements of the dia-lectical opposition and affirming instead respect, alterity, and radical responsibility on the part of each toward the other, it is possible to rearticulate interpersonal relations in such a way that justice, as Levinas imagines it, remains a viable goal.

Notes

1. See Hegel in Miller's translation, 1977. My reading of Hegel in what follows is heavily indebted to Alexandre Kojève's.

2. On the influence of Hegel (as read through Kojève) on Sartre and Lacan, for example, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes 287, 345–347.

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

4. After the lecture Achebe's piece was published as "An Image of Africa" in the Massachusetts Review, 18 (1977): 782–94. It was subsequently revised for the 1988 third Norton Critical Edition of the novel (251–62). It appears in the current Fourth Edition with discrepancies between the two versions given in notes (336–49).

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 a 2000 interview, when denying the value of Conrad's novel, he noted that "I've not encountered any good art that promoted genocide" (Jaggi 6). For a more extended discussion of racism in Conrad, see Hunt Hawkins, 365–66, 374.

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

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

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

10. This is underscored symbolically by another passage. When Marlow first 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 neck—Why? Where did he get it? Was it a badge—an ornament—a charm—a propitiatory act? Was there any idea at all connected with it? It looked startling around his black neck, this bit of white thread from beyond the seas" (25). Marlow's list is strik-ingly similar to a passage found in Jacques Derrida's Limited Inc, an examination of which will, I believe, help to clarify the issue of failed reference.

Derrida considers "I forgot my umbrella," a strange isolated phrase found in the unpublished writings of Nietzsche. What does the phrase mean; to what does it refer? Derrida concludes that "[a] thousand possibilities will always remain open even if one understands some-thing in this phrase that makes sense (as a citation? the beginning of a novel? a proverb? someone else's secretarial archives? an exercise in learning language? the narration of a dream? an alibi? a cryptic code—conscious or not? the example of a linguist or a speech act theoretician letting his imagination wander for short distances, etc.?" (Derrida 63). According to Derrida it is impossible to fix definitively the meaning of this phrase. The problem lies not in the peculiarity of the phrase, in its lack of explanation or elaboration, but in the nature of language itself. A necessary characteristic of language, or any signifying system, is what Derrida calls "iterability": its ability to signify in the absence of that which it signifies—"the possibility of its being repeated in the absence not only of its 'referent,' which is self-evident, but in the absence of a determinate signified or of the intention of actual signification, as well as of all intention of present communication." However, while iterability, the "structural possibility of being weaned from the referent or the signified," is that which makes signification possible, it also makes it impossible (10). If a signifier is able to break with the original context of its inscription or enunciation, then what is to prevent this from happening all the time? Derrida notes that "[e]very sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written . . . can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable. This does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchoring" (12). By introducing radical indeterminacy into signification, iterability breaks the closed circuit of reference. With the connection between words and things broken, language becomes a free-floating structure.

11. For more on this, see Kojève.

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

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