Merleau-Ponty’s Doubt: The Wild of Nothing

Abstract

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’ was published serially in Blackwood‘s’ Magazine in 1899. At that time Paul Cézanne, in his last years at Aix-en-Provence, was beginning Les Grandes Baigneuses, with its anxious nudes playing on the border of earth and blue air — figures we will see again, in fact, in the young Picasso. Unlike Picasso, Cézanne rarely painted from a model. He mistrusted women, as did Conrad’s protagonist, Marlowe, who thought they were “out of touch with truth,” living in a world of their own “too beautiful altogether,” which, like the shallow spectacle in the Impressionist’s eye, “would go to pieces before the first sunset” (C, 27).