Abstract
Conrad’s exploration of the epistemological uncertainty of the modern condition has been discussed by many critics, who vary in the degree of scepticism which they attribute to his work. Ian Watt describes Conrad’s use of disrupted chronology as reflecting his ‘sense of the fragmentary and elusive quality of individual experience’ and analyses what he terms Conrad’s ‘subjective moral impressionism’ in ‘Heart of Darkness’: that is to say, his use of a narrative form which asserts ‘the bounded and ambiguous nature of individual understanding’. Watt suggests a moderate form of modernist uncertainty, involving subjectivity, fragmentariness and ambiguity.1 J. Hillis Miller goes further in suggesting that ‘the special place of Joseph Conrad in English literature lies in the fact that in him the nihilism covertly dominant in modern culture is brought to the surface and shown for what it is.’2 Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan argues plausibly for a pervasive tension in Conrad’s work between, on the one hand, a quest for epistemological and ethical certainty and, on the other, a relativistic scepticism about the possibility of such certainty.3 There is general agreement, however, that Conrad’s fiction emphasizes the problematic nature of questions of what we can know, how we can know it and what degree of certainty is possible.
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Notes
J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 5.
Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
On the elements of scepticism and nihilism in Conrad’s ‘conscious philosophy’ and their connection to ‘the climate of thought in the late nineteenth century’ see C. B. Cox, Joseph Conrad: The Modern Imagination (London: Dent, 1974), p. 8. On Conrad’s scepticism concerning language see Hugh Epstein, ‘Trusting in Words of Some Sort: Aspects of the Use of Language in Nostromo’, The Conradian, 12.1 (May 1987), 17–31.
See, for example, Padmini Mongia, ‘Empire, Narrative and the Feminine in Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness’, in Contexts for Conrad, eds Keith Carabine, Owen Knowles and Wieslaw Krajka (East European Monographs; Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1993), pp. 135–50, rpt. in Under Postcolonial Eyes: Joseph Conrad After Empire, eds Gail Fincham and Myrtle Hooper (Rondebosch: University of Cape Town Press, 1996), pp. 120–32. See also the chapters by Mongia and Roberts in CG and Joseph Conrad: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Elaine Jordan (London: Macmillan, 1996), Introduction, pp. 6–9.
Bonnie Kime Scott (ed.), The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990);
Juliet Flower MacCannell, The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy (London: Routledge, 1991), Chapter 1, ‘The Primal Scene of Modernity’ (pp. 9–30) and Chapter 2, ‘Modernity as the Absence of the Other: the General Self’ (pp. 31–40);
Alice A. Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press 1985);
Alison M. Jagger and Susan R. Bordo (eds), Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 1989);
Gabriele Griffin, Difference in View: Woman and Modernism (Basingstoke: Taylor & Francis, 1994).
Janet Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’, in The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 141–56, 141, 146.
Griselda Pollock quotes Jules Michelet’s La Femme: ‘How many irritations for the single woman! She can hardly ever go out in the evening; she would be taken for a prostitute’: Oeuvres completes (Vol. XVIII, 1858–60) (Paris: Flammarion, 1985), p. 413,
quoted Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 69.
The flâneur is the stroller or idler whose home is the streets and arcades of the city and who ‘goes botanizing on the asphalt’: Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Jarry Zohn (London and New York: Verso, 1983), p. 36. On the association of the flâneur with the alienated individual and with victims, murderers and detectives, see pp. 40–6, 170.
Michel Foucault, ‘The Order of Discourse’, in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 48–78 (p. 56).
For example, Jacques Berthoud argues that Conrad is ‘dramatizing the need for a metaphysics that can’t exist’: Jacques Berthoud, Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 190. Edward Said puts it in more complex terms: ‘Conrad’s goal is to make us see, or otherwise transcend the absence of everything but words, so that we may pass into a realm of vision beyond the words … For Conrad the meaning produced by writing was a kind of visual outline, which written language would approach only from the outside and from a distance that seemed to remain constant’; ‘by using substance instead of words the Conradian hero, like Conrad himself, aims to vindicate and articulate his imagination. Every reader of Conrad knows how this aim too is bound to fail’:
Edward Said, The World, The Text and the Critic (1983; London: Faber, 1984), pp. 95, 110.
‘The term implied author … comes from Wayne C. Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) … [It] is used to refer to that picture of a creating author behind a literary work that the reader builds up on the basis of an image put in the work … by the author him or herself. The implied author may be very different from the real-life individual responsible for writing the work.’ ‘By extension the term “implied reader” was coined to describe the reader which the text (or the author through the text) suggests that it expects’; Jeremy Hawthorn, A Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory, (3rd edn (London: Edward Arnold, 1998), pp. 24, 284.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 25.
But for an account which has affinities with my own, see Joanna M. Smith, ‘“Too Beautiful Altogether”: Patriarchal Ideology in Heart of Darkness’, in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Literature, ed. Ross C. Murfin (New York: St. Martin’s Press; London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 179–98.
Rebecca Stott notes that ivory, the object of Kurtz’s exploitation of Africa, appears in Brussels only in the keys of the Intended’s grand piano, so that ‘just as the source of the ivory in the white woman’s drawing-room is the darkness of the African wilderness, the source of the white woman herself is the savage mistress, correlated in the final pages through the motif of the outstretched arms of both women’: Rebecca Stott, The Fabrication of the Late Victorian Femme Fatale: The Kiss of Death (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 150–1.
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© 2000 Andrew Michael Roberts
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Roberts, A.M. (2000). Epistemology, Modernity and Masculinity: ‘Heart of Darkness’. In: Conrad and Masculinity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288973_6
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