“Absurd be— exploded!”: Re- Membering Experience

through Liminality in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

F R E D S O L I N G E R

Concluding his essay “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Mar-
gins of the Modern Nation,” Homi Bhabha writes: “it is by living on the
borderline of history and language, on the limits of race and gender, that
we are in a position to translate the differences between them into a kind
of solidarity” (320). Applying this concept to his reading of Salman
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Mark Mossman suggests that Bhabha is
saying that “there are always social spaces or locations for an individual
to exist in which the individual can operate, and can also understand and
be deeply critical of every side of the culture as a whole: it is the ability to
play both sides of system, the ultimate ability to perceive the schema of
the cultural system in action” (74). These “social spaces” in which one
can “play both sides of the system,” in which one is “neither this nor that,
and yet is both,” may be called the liminal space (Turner 9).

It is from such a position, I intend on arguing, that Marlow narrates

(and Conrad writes) Heart of Darkness. Marlow “followed the sea”; he was
a man with “no birthplace, no home, no school, no fixed social or
domestic ties”; indeed, as a seaman, if he can be said to have a home, it
exists somewhere between ports (Heart 5; Watt 206). His voyages have
led to experiences he can, at times, scarcely put into words. In telling his
tale to his fellow sailors, Marlow attempts to bridge the “psychological
abyss between cultures”; his narration—“Marlow’s inconclusiveness, his
evasions, his arabesque meditations on his feelings and ideas”—attests to
the difficulty of such an undertaking (Ashcroft, et al. 62; Said 23).

What he is unable to say is just as important as what he does say:

Conrad incorporates these “evasions” and “meditations” into Marlow’s
narrative as a way of waving a red flag at the reader (Said 23). My aim in
this essay is to highlight the narrative techniques Conrad utilizes to pro-
duce these ruptures; to show why his re- membering of Marlow’s frag-
mented experience is effective in exposing the horror of imperialism;
and to demonstrate exactly how Marlow is speaking from a liminal

Conradiana, vol. 40, no. 1, 2008 © Texas Tech University Press

position, a position that enables him to be, if not exactly oppositional,
then at least critical. Before I can do that, however, I feel I should begin
by explaining what exactly I mean by liminality and how it applies to
Heart of Darkness.

In his study of initiation practices in Africa during the early 1950s,
under the influence of earlier work in the field by Arnold van Gennep,
anthropologist Victor Turner identified three phases within the process.
In the first phase, the neophyte is separated from his current position
within the group or society; in the final stage, the passage is consum-
mated. “Betwixt and between” the fixed points of the ritual exists what
Turner refers to as the threshold, or liminal time (7). The in- depth study
of this transitional period represents Turner’s unique contribution.

Of this liminal period, he writes: “during the intervening liminal

period, the state of the ritual subject (the ‘passenger’) is ambiguous; he
passes through a realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past
or coming state” (Turner 5). Liminality “takes place [ . . . ] out of the
structures of ordinary life”; indeed, the neophytes are “sometimes said
to ‘be in another place’” (Stein and Stein 294). This “other place,” the
liminal space, is composed of the unstructured: “the unbounded, the
infinite, the limitless” (Turner 8).

“As members of society,” Turner writes, “most of us see only what

we expect to see [ . . . ] what we are conditioned to see” (6). Society is
therefore unable to allow for the existence of a “not- boy- not- man”
(Turner 6). The neophyte remains of this society, yet he must be with-
drawn from it in some way in order to consummate the rite of passage.
This is accomplished either literally, by taking him to some unknown
place, or figuratively, through the use of incantations, costumes or
masks—through these means, he enters that unbounded, infinite, limit-
less liminal space, a space marked by disorientation, but also by reflec-
tion: during the liminal period, neophytes are alternately forced and
encouraged to think about their society, their cosmos, and the powers
that generate and sustain them (Turner 14). The neophyte comes to
understand his culture, in a place outside—and yet, in some sense, still
within that culture, but away from its expectations and conditions; a
place where he is able, to reiterate Mossman, “to be deeply critical of
every side of the culture as a whole.”

For Marlow, this liminal period occurs on the “mighty big river [ . . . ]

resembling an immense snake uncoiled,” the transitional phase that
exists between the Company’s headquarters and Kurtz’s station (Heart

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10–11). With liminality now defined, I wish to show exactly how Marlow
fits into such a definition, and how, by close association, Joseph Conrad
shares in his protagonist’s (op)position.

Of the changes wrought during the liminal period, Turner writes, “[i]t
is not a mere acquisition of knowledge, but a change in being” (11; my
emphasis). As Marlow describes himself prior to his voyage, he paints a
picture of an impetuous fellow: anxious, subject to fancy, one who
“flew around like mad to get ready” for his journey (Heart 13). This por-
trait of Marlow as a young man stands in stark contrast to the descrip-
tions offered by the unnamed narrator of Heart of Darkness. The Marlow
aboard the Nellie has “an ascetic aspect,” “resembled an idol,” and sat in
“the pose of a meditating Buddha” (Heart 2, 146). “I felt so sure,” he
says, “they could not possibly know the things I knew”—but it is more
than knowledge that he holds over them: Marlow’s experiences cut to
the core of his being, effecting a great transformation (Heart 133).

Marlow emerges as something of an evangelical figure with a diffi-

cult story to tell, but one that must be told nonetheless. His very first
word in the novel is the conjunction “and,” which gives the reader the
impression that this is the continuation of an ongoing narrative—but it
is also an interesting choice for another reason (Heart 5). By definition, a
conjunction is a word that acts as a bridge, that joins together words,
thoughts, and concepts—it is a go- between, not unlike the man Marlow
himself.

As mentioned earlier, Marlow is a man without a past, or at least a

man without a past until he creates that past through a narrative. From
what one can surmise, he lived in England, boarded a French steamer
with a Swedish captain, all in the service of the Trading Society, which
was a “Continental concern” (Heart 11). The narrator of Heart of Dark-
ness tells us that Marlow “did not represent his class,” that he was not
“typical” (5). Ian Watt concurs: “Marlow is indeed difficult to believe in
as a fictional character. He belongs to a class of one, a class composed of
British ship’s officers whose minds and interests have been produced
by the unique circumstances of Conrad’s own national and personal
history” (206). Conrad—Polish expatriate, French seaman, English sub-
ject—has, it would seem, much in common with his creation.

In his 1917 author’s note to Youth—A Narrative: and Two Other Stories

(1902), Conrad speaks of Marlow as someone “with whom my relations
have grown very intimate in the course of years” (Prefaces 71). Very inti-
mate, indeed: Watt sees Marlow as “a composite, combining the two

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main roles in life that Conrad had experiences—the seaman and the
writer” and as a “means of allowing his author to express himself more
completely than ever before [ . . . ] one which enabled him to be more
fully himself” (213, 212). In “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness,” Chinua Achebe seems to argue that Marlow is
Conrad’s stand- in: “Marlow seems to me to enjoy Conrad’s complete
confidence—a feeling reinforced by the close similarities between their
two careers” (256).

For Achebe, this alignment allows him to damn the two of them:

Conrad was a “thoroughgoing racist” and Marlow was his puppet
(257). Guyanese writer Wilson Harris sympathizes with the sentiments
behind Achebe’s essay, and yet he believes that Achebe’s condemnation
of Conrad and Heart of Darkness is flawed. Instead, Harris sees Heart of
Darkness as a “frontier novel” that “stands upon a threshold of capacity
to which Conrad pointed though he never attained that capacity him-
self” (263).

Harris attributes that unattained capacity to “an exhaustion of

spirit” (266); in “Two Visions in Heart of Darkness” from Culture and
Imperialism, Edward Said believes that Conrad was held back by the
snares of his era. He too is discouraged that Conrad could not see
beyond “the idea at the back of it,” the idea that “redeems” colonialism.
He recognizes that “[a]s a creature of his time, Conrad could not grant
the natives their freedom, despite his severe critique of the imperialism
that enslaved them” (Heart 8; Said 24). The “time” Said speaks of is an
era where it was universally understood that “[i]ndependence was for
whites and Europeans; the lesser or subject peoples were to be ruled;
science, learning, history emanated from the West” (24). Imperialism,
then, was the only view of the world available to Conrad.

Said instead decides to focus on the usefulness of Heart of Darkness in

a postcolonial context. Although the word liminality is never uttered in
Said’s text, the whole of it seems informed by the concept. Recalling the
contemplation aspect of the liminal period as put forth by Turner, Said
writes: “your self- consciousness as an outsider can allow you actively to
comprehend how the machine works, given that you and it are funda-
mentally not in perfect synchrony or correspondence” (25). Conrad,
“[n]ever the wholly incorporated and fully acculturated Englishman,”
in the society but not of it, is therefore able to maintain distance from the
subject that comes under his attack (Said 25). (It should be noted that
Conrad was never a wholly incorporated writer of English: Watt points
out that Conrad’s written English never freed itself from both Polish

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and French influences in “vocabulary, syntax, and rhetorical style”
[21–22].)

These attacks manifest themselves in the fissures that develop within
Marlow’s narrative. He starts speaking, only to halt his momentum
moments later; he performs rhetorical U- turns, saying something only
to recall it moments later in the hopes of finding words more accurate;
he is, by turns, forceful and declarative and tentative and halting. Most
intriguingly, however, Marlow relates certain events as he first saw
them, not as he would later understand them: in doing so, he places
both listener and reader alongside him on the steamer or at the station
as things transpired. He delays one’s recognition of just what has hap-
pened, the implicit message being to forestall one’s judgment until they
are in possession of the proper knowledge. Watt termed this technique,
where “the physical impression must precede the understanding of
cause,” delayed decoding (78). It is all of these narrative devices that I
now wish to take a look at, to show how Conrad communicates to the
reader that all is not well (Said 29).

Harris calls Heart of Darkness a parody, “a parody that cuts to the heart
of paternalism” (265). It is this parody, this distortion of reality, that
Harris believes signals to the reader that all is “not quite as it should be
or appears to be” (265). “These distortions of the human mask,” he
writes, “set their teeth upon African characters like an initiation cere-
mony at the heart of the Bush to bite deep as well into the European
conquistador/butcher/businessman Kurtz” (Harris 265).

Describing the masks, costumes, figurines, et al., which are used in

some rites of passage, Turner writes: “Sometimes things retain their
customary shapes but are portrayed in unusual colors” (12). He calls
this a “primordial mode of abstraction” (Turner 12–13). This use of
color has the effect of disorienting the neophyte—as mentioned earlier,
Turner believes that members of society are conditioned to only see
things a certain way: this rupture within the neophytes’ reality shocks
him out of his complacency and causes him to think more acutely about
that reality.

I would draw a parallel between this abstraction and the one pro-

duced by impressionism, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as
“the method of painting [ . . . ] things so as to give their general tone and
effect, or the broad impression which they produce at first sight,
without elaboration of detail.” An impressionist would not necessarily

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paint a landscape the colors that they are, in an objective sense, but
rather he would paint them as they seemed to him, in a given moment—
verisimilitude is not the key; transmitting the “general tone and effect”
of the scene is.

Conrad often spoke of the importance of “impressions”: in his

preface to The Nigger of “Narcissus,” Conrad says that, for art to be effec-
tive, it must be an “impression conveyed through the senses” (Prefaces
51). He developed a technique which was “the verbal equivalent of the
impressionist painter’s attempt to render visual sensation directly”
(Watt 176). Watt terms this technique “delayed decoding, since it com-
bines the forward temporal progress of the mind, as it receives mes-
sages from the outside world, with the much slower reflexive process of
making out their meaning” (175). In other words, the narrative occupies
a transitional space between recognition and understanding. The fol-
lowing is an example of delayed decoding within Heart of Darkness:
“Once, I remember, we came upon a man- of- war anchored off the coast.
There wasn’t even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. [ . . . ] In
the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incompre-
hensible, firing into a continent” (22). Shortly afterwards, Marlow tells
the listeners that someone assured him there was a camp of natives
nearby, and yet even this assurance is not enough to override the power
and the strangeness of the image of a ship firing at nothing or, rather,
“into a continent” (Heart 22). Marlow notes that it had a “touch of
insanity” and yet, judging by the reaction of that someone onboard who
assured him that there was a reason (“an idea”) behind it, it must have
been commonplace at the time (22). This technique, as Said puts it,
“unsettles the reader’s sense not only of the very idea of empire, but of
something more basic, reality itself” (29).

Within the liminal phase, abstraction is used to unsettle the neo-

phyte, so as to clear the way for reflection: “ideas, sentiments, and facts
that had been hitherto for the neophytes bound in configurations and
accepted unthinkingly are [ . . . ] resolved into their constituents”
(Turner 14). This corresponds to a similar aspect of delayed decoding,
illustrated in this passage from Heart of Darkness, where Marlow gets his
first look at Kurtz’s station:

Through my glasses I saw the slope of a hill interspersed with rare trees
and perfectly free from undergrowth. A long decaying building on the
summit was half buried in the high grass; the large holes in the peaked
roof gaped black from afar; the jungle and the woods make a back-

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ground. There was no enclosure or fence of any kind; but there had been
one apparently, for near the house half- a- dozen slim posts remained in a
row, roughly trimmed, and with their upper ends ornamented with
round carved balls. (96)

Marlow breaks the scene down into its constituent parts, disentangling
the building from the jungle. He draws the listeners’ attention to the
“round carved balls” which, if one does not avert their eyes, become
“heads on the stakes” (Heart 107). One is conditioned to believe that that
which appears on the ends of posts must be ornamental balls, and yet
Conrad shows us otherwise. Again and again, the reader’s assumptions
are undermined; again and again, the reader is asked to consider what
other things he or she takes as a given are not quite what they seem to be.

At one point in the narrative, Marlow must sense incredulity from his
listeners:

“Why do you sigh in this beastly way, somebody? Absurd? Well,
absurd.” [ . . . ] “Absurd!” he cried. “This is the worst of trying to tell . . .
Here you all are, each moored with good addresses, like a hulk with two
anchors, a butcher round another, excellent appetites, and temperature
normal—you hear—normal from year’s end to year’s end. And you say,
Absurd! Absurd be—exploded!” (87)

“Exploded” is an apposite word choice, for what Marlow essentially
does with language is explode it only to re- member it. Harris sees
Conrad’s finished product, Heart of Darkness, as a parody, and yet I
believe it cuts deeper than that. The disquieting tone of the novel is not
only accomplished through the tale that Conrad tells, but also through
the way that same tale is assembled in the narrative by his surrogate
Marlow. The difficulty that Marlow has with putting his experiences
into words his listeners can relate to—or finding words that relate to his
experiences—should not go unnoticed; indeed, I believe it is another of
Conrad’s techniques for drawing the reader’s attention to the savagery
(and the absurdity) of colonialism.

Canadian poet Dennis Lee, in an essay entitled “Cadence, Country,

Silence: Writing in Colonial Space,” describes the difficulty he had as a
colonial trying to write about his country in words that were not of his
country: “The words I knew said Britain, and they said America. But
they did not say my home. They were always and only about someone

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else’s life. All the rich structures of language were available, but the cur-
rents that animated them were not native to the people who use the lan-
guage here” (17). All around him, people were writing and speaking,
“words spilled out like crazy,” but Lee “just gagged”: “I can no more
observe something in the street, go home, and write it up than I can fly”
(12, 21).

Marlow, it would seem, could relate to Lee, even as he could not

relate to anyone else. While trying to describe the smile/not- smile of
the manager, he confesses: “I remember it, but I can’t explain” (Heart
36). He asks of his audience: “Do you see the story? Do you see any-
thing? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream” (Heart 47). On
occasion, he gives in to his frustration, deeming his narration “impos-
sible” (Heart 48). He says, “I’ve been telling you what we said—
repeating the phrases we pronounced,—but what’s the good?” (Heart
124). As an English subject who ventured out on a French steamer with
a Swedish captain in the service of a European company, into the heart
of Africa, what words could suffice?

He meets a fellow traveler, so to speak, in the Russian whose native

language, as written in Towson’s book, appears to Marlow’s eyes as
cipher (Heart 100). The Russian, to further complicate things, speaks
English, and has arrived in Africa after having persuaded a Dutch com-
pany to equip him. Like Marlow, the Russian exhibits troubled speech,
notable for its pauses and fragments: “Brother sailor . . . honour . . .
pleasure . . . delight . . . introduce myself . . . Russian . . . son of an arch-
priest . . . Government of Tambov . . . What? Tobacco! English tobacco;
the excellent English tobacco! Now, that’s brotherly. Smoke? Where’s a
sailor that does not smoke?” (Heart 98–99). Indeed, Marlow notes at one
point that the Russian’s “feelings were too much for speech” (Heart
109).

Lee loosens the gag from his mouth through what he calls cadence,

a concept that is not intrinsically Canadian, but, rather, one that encom-
passes the whole of human experience. It is in this way that he learns to
become comfortable with his native land. Conrad, however, does not
relieve Marlow (or the Russian) of their speech impediments, two colo-
nials who are a long way from home; instead, they form the heart of
his narrative. In stumbling over these obstacles, the reader is jarred
into discovering “the philanthropic pretence of the whole concern”
(Heart 42).

As the situation at the station comes to a head, Marlow proclaims aloud

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that he thinks “Mr. Kurtz is a remarkable man” (Heart 116). The man-
ager turns a “cold heavy glance” on him, and Marlow takes this look to
mean that “[m]y hour of favor was over; I found myself lumped along
with Kurtz as a partisan of methods for which the time was not ripe: I
was unsound!” (Heart 116). If he has to be “lumped along” with anyone,
Marlow, it seems, would prefer to be with the “remarkable man,” than
with the manager and the other pilgrims (Heart 116).

Theirs, however, was a short- term union, for, not long after Marlow

aligns himself with Kurtz, Kurtz expires. It is hard to say what the
source was of Marlow’s admiration for, and loyalty to, Kurtz—perhaps
it was envy: Kurtz had consummated his passage, “he had stepped over
the edge, while [Marlow] had been permitted to draw back [his] hesi-
tating foot” (Heart 132). If it is envy, though, it seems misplaced.
Marlow held one foot precariously over the divide between life and
death and returned to tell us about it. He encountered that “inappre-
ciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invis-
ible” where “perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are
just compressed,” and it is from that threshold, that liminal position,
that Marlow communicates to us (Heart 133). What, after all, did Kurtz
ever tell us, really?

“There is a moment,” Lee writes, “in which I experience [ . . . ] things

as standing forth with a clarity and a preciousness that makes me want
to cry and celebrate physically at the same time” (22). Conrad strikes a
similar, if less celebratory note:

if one be deserving and fortunate, one may perchance attain to such
clearness of sincerity that at last the presented vision of regret or pity, of
terror or birth, shall awaken in the hearts of the beholders that feeling of
unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in
joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all
mankind to the visible world. (Prefaces 52)

Sometimes, one would rather not see; and sometimes, as Said argues, one
can see, but due to certain constrictions, cannot do anything about it:
“Conrad’s tragic limitation is that even though he could see clearly that
on one level imperialism was essentially pure dominance and land-
grabbing, he could not then conclude that imperialism had to end so that
‘natives’ could lead lives free from European domination” (Said 30).

Marlow and Kurtz, similarly, are “creatures of their time and cannot

take the next step,” but Marlow’s testimony, narrated from a liminal

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(op)position, transcends its time, as he foresaw presciently: “I have a
voice too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced”
(Heart 65). We heed his call in our contemporary era, where a “whole
movement [ . . . ] and theory of resistance and response to empire exists”
(Said 30). “My task,” Conrad wrote, “is by the power of the written word
to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see”
(Prefaces 52). His task is complete; the rest is ours to see to.

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