Between Narrative Paradigms: Joseph
Conrad and the Shift from Realism to
Modernism from a Genre Perspective

Daniel Just

Wondering why so little had been said about the historical connection between the
novel and the novella, Georg Luka´cs opens his essay on Alexander Solzhenitsyn by
arguing that the interrelationship between these two genres in the course of literary
history is not only more interesting but also far more instructive to study than their
aesthetic ties. Even a neophyte, Luka´cs believes, can see that the novel and the novella
appear at different historical moments, and deduce that as genres they must therefore
play different historical roles. In each genre, the unique set of aesthetic features is apt
to reflect different historical phases. For Luka´cs, the most fundamental aspect that
determines which one of these genres would be culturally more suitable at a specific
moment is a degree of transformation a given society is currently undergoing.
Whereas the novel, with its aesthetics that encompasses the entirety of objects,
expresses relatively stabilized historical periods, the novella, with its focus on a single
situation, always appears when a society experiences radical changes. It is precisely
this ability to record rapid historical changes that, according to Luka´cs, makes the
novella into either a forerunner (the ‘‘Not-Yet’’, Nochnicht) or a rearguard (the ‘‘No-
Longer’’, Nichtmehr) of the social world depicted by the novel.

1

Even though, as Luka´cs admits, it is often difficult to decide whether a particular

novella terminates a period or opens a new one, it will be no surprise to those familiar
with Luka´cs’s later political views to read that it is the bourgeois novella that
performs the rearguard function, whereas the socialist novellas are celebrated as
precursors of new reality. The examples he gives are, on one hand, Joseph Conrad,
and, on the other, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Conrad, a typically bourgeois writer,
remains for Luka´cs unavoidably retrograde; Solzhenitsyn, on the other hand,
becomes a symbol of progress. Where the novellas of the bourgeois Conrad represent
a conclusion of a period, Luka´cs believes that Solzhenitsyn’s novellas signal an
overture to the process of literary rediscovery of the self in the near socialist future.

Daniel Just is at the University of Essex, UK.

1

Luka´cs, 7 – 13.

English Studies
Vol. 89, No. 3, June 2008, 273 – 286

ISSN 0013-838X (print)/ISSN 1744-4217 (online) Ó 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/00138380801912941

Leaving aside the question to what extent Solzhenitsyn really offered a social

prelude to the future, Luka´cs’s more general observation that novellas mark a
transitory phase between social periods and narrative paradigms deserves some
attention. Indeed, this argument has ever since gained many advocates. What,
however, Luka´cs leaves without further reflection is how these narrative shifts happen
and, even more importantly, what allows us to draw the line between the ‘‘No-
Longer’’ and the ‘‘Not-Yet’’ in these fairly short historical moments. If the novella
offers a privileged insight into how narratives reflect the changing historical situation,
what is it that makes some novellas into testimonies of the quickly disappearing past
whereas others become harbingers of the near future? What in Conrad, for instance,
to use Luka´cs’s primary example of the bourgeois novella-writer, indicates that his
shorter fiction represents the disintegrating social world of the nineteenth century,
together with Realism as its narrative paradigm, and not the ‘‘Not-Yet’’ of the soon-
to-come Modernism?

Like Luka´cs, a number of more recent literary theorists have argued that

Conrad played a significant role in shifting the Western narrative discourse from
Realism to Modernism. According to Fredric Jameson and Ian Watt, to name a
few, Conrad’s unprecedented consideration of style makes him into a herald of
Modernism.

2

For the first time in English literary tradition, these two critics

argue, language ceases to be a mere medium of communication and instead itself
becomes an object of interrogation. This might be true, granted the difficulty of
pinpointing such moments. It is, however, important to emphasize that these
conclusions, which are in no way limited to only these two theorists, were made
primarily in reference to Conrad’s novels. Even Luka´cs would probably agree
that the novels such as Lord Jim (1900) and Nostromo (1904) can serve quite well
in typifying the techniques of Modernism. But what about Conrad’s earlier
novellas? Luka´cs does not offer any answer because his references to Conrad are
scarce and made only in passing. Jameson and Watt do not contribute much to
this issue either because none of them emphasizes genres and their arguably
different role in the transformation of narrative paradigms at the end of the
nineteenth century.

With a distinctive narrative structure and a lesser degree of stylization than his

novels, Conrad’s novellas, as even a fleeting glance at them reveals, are not merely
short novels. The reason why Conrad writes novellas at a particular historical
moment is, as Luka´cs rightly points out, the ability of this genre to respond to the
rapidly changing social world. That is, however, where Luka´cs’s usefulness ends.
Conrad turns to the novella not in order to record the soon-to-disappear social world
but rather in order to find suitable literary means for expressing the incongruities
brought about by the coming social system. In other words, he turns to it due to the
potential of this genre to accommodate such linguistic and narratological devices
that, unlike the novel, can give rise to a new, historically more receptive type of story.

2

Watt, Conrad; Jameson, ‘‘Romance.’’

274

D. Just

As is perhaps most noticeable in Heart of Darkness (1899), the way Conrad envisions
such a narrative is simply by displaying the inability to convey a story. It is precisely
Conrad’s slow and careful staging of this failure that makes his novellas offer quite a
different narrative solution to the disintegrating Realism than the upcoming
Modernism, thereby suggesting an unusual perspective on the transition between
these two paradigms. If we look at this shift from the perspective of Conrad’s
novellas, we see something other than either a ‘‘No-Longer’’ of Realism or a ‘‘Not-
Yet’’ of Modernism.

* * *

As Heart of Darkness demonstrates—however ambiguously, as we will see—
colonialism was among the strongest social elements that influenced not only
Conrad, but the late nineteenth-century fiction in general. For Conrad, in parti-
cular, the experience of exploitation of other cultures, as well as other negative
consequences brought with the expansion of industrial capitalism, precipitated a
need to radically change his mode of narration. The argument that narrative
literature needs to find new ways of expression is omnipresent in Conrad’s
correspondence from the late 1890s, especially with Edward Garnett and R. B.
Cunningham Graham.

3

As these letters show, Conrad was convinced that for a

writer colonialism meant an obligation to rethink traditional modes of realistic
depiction. This plea for a new type of narrative, one that would reflect on the
expansion of national market capitalism to its imperialist form, nevertheless
remained only on the level of a call. Conrad proposed nothing concrete about how
such a story should look. The only thing he seemed to be sure about in his letters is
what this historically more adequate narrative form should not be—a frivolous
experimentation with style.

Although Conrad believed that writers cannot disregard societal changes and

continue writing in the pseudo-oral narration style typical of realistic fiction, a
narrative, according to him, could not become a playground for stylistic experiments.
What became evident in the last decade of the nineteenth century was that not only
Realism, but also what was to become Modernism, could not offer a satisfactory
answer to the requirements imposed on narrative literature by the current historical
situation—where Realism domesticates the unsettling historical experiences by
presenting them as classifiable objects, Modernism will diffuse them in formal
experiments.

It is with these concerns that Conrad set to work on his most famous novella,

Heart of Darkness. A story told in an Ich-form, reporting past events, and narrated by
somebody who could be easily mistaken for an omniscient narrator, does not
necessarily immediately strike as being too different from other stories. What,

3

See especially letters from 1898 and 1899 in Conrad, Letters.

Joseph Conrad and the Shift from Realism to Modernism

275

however, was radically different, and what unsettled the edifice of a more traditional
type of storytelling, was a missing founding stone. The event—the event—Heart of
Darkness tells a story about remains absent. With this void in its foundation, Heart of
Darkness forms, to use Northrop Frye’s phrase, an essentially ‘‘dislocated story’’—a
narrative that oscillates around a central situation that never becomes a direct object
of the story.

4

As literary critics have been proposing for quite some time, the

dislocation of the central event in this novella—namely, what exactly happened to
Kurtz—is something the story conveys only indirectly in its use of imagery of light
and darkness, work and idleness, efficiency and recalcitrance, eloquence and
inarticulateness.

Marlow, for instance, portrays himself as verbally deficient in comparison to

Kurtz, who is from the very beginning presented as a masterful speaker. Kurtz is
also an exemplary employee of the Company, and therefore has great prospects in
achieving a higher social status, as well as financial prosperity. As Jerry Wasserman
argues, language in this novella becomes a metaphor for the light and order that
are imposed on the intractable darkness, silence and chaos of the Congo jungle.

5

But in spite of this seductive symbolism, interpreting Heart of Darkness solely on
the basis of deciphering its metaphors quickly proves insufficient. Since the story
distributes its images in a very ambiguous fashion, the meaning of various symbols
and metaphors changes. With no unequivocal allegorical frame of reference, it
becomes, for instance, less and less clear as the story proceeds what darkness and
light actually represent. Not only is Marlow growing sceptical of both civilization
and language’s ability to communicate—particularly as he realizes more and more
the way the Company works—but Kurtz himself starts losing the very efficiency
that earned him the Company’s praise. Whereas Marlow at first finds himself
working silently, as if compensating for Kurtz’s eloquence, as the story develops,
both Marlow and Kurtz lose their vigour in imposing language, work and order on
something that is supposedly inarticulate, idle and chaotic. Both characters, in
other words, lose precisely that which the story initially presents as central to
civilization, and the seemingly clear opposition of light and darkness slowly
disintegrates.

But dislocated symbolism was surely not enough to constitute a new mode of

storytelling. Heavy imagery together with realistic detail might, indeed, portray the
exploitation of Africa, but not necessarily offer what Conrad was looking for, namely
an adequate narrative response to these atrocities. Since Conrad was aware that
realistic, or symbolical, portrayal would offer only a Western perspective on what can
happen to its own values should they encounter radical alterity, in Heart of Darkness
he did not merely describe a slow decomposition of the individual, language, labour,
and order, but also attempted to perform this disintegration. In fact, the language of

4

Frye, 267.

5

Wasserman, 103.

276

D. Just

this novella is relatively conventional, with expressive sentences, vivid adjectives
and a sense of suspense. It is only at certain moments—usually the scenes of
terror and violence—that Conrad adopts the famous impressionistic technique.
As, for instance, when Marlow travels to the central station and describes ‘‘the
tremor of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird,
appealing, suggestive, and wild [. . .]’’;

6

or when he approaches Kurtz’s house and

suddenly notices ‘‘black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids,—a head that seemed
to sleep at the top of that pole, and, with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow
white line of the teeth, was smiling too.’’

7

However, although in these passages

the rhetorical aspect of the narrative momentarily yields a glance of the story’s
figurative purpose, it is the structure of the novella and its narrative technique in
which the mechanism of the disintegration of meaning finds its most powerful
vehicle.

The reason why Heart of Darkness is so ambiguous and semantically barren is

because of Conrad’s unusual emphasis on the structural disjunction between the
story and the plot. From the narratological point of view, as Marlow tells his story
about Kurtz, the plot of his narrative of Kurtz’s story captures this story only
inadequately. Or, as Peter Brooks explains this structural disjunction, ‘‘Marlow’s
structuring of his own fabula as sjuzˇet has attached itself to Kurtz’s fabula, and
can find its significant outcome only in finding Kurtz’s sjuzˇet’’, which is precisely
what never happens.

8

Despite the fact that Brooks does not work with Frye’s

notion of the displaced central situation, his analysis is a very accurate illustration
of this concept. For both Brooks and Frye, the difficulty in deciphering the
meaning of this narrative resides in the fact that, in going back and forth, the plot
constantly prepares for the revelation of an event yet to come. Since such a
delayed delivery of the centre of the story never actually takes place, the
anticipated central situation remains only proleptically announced. Even though
neither Brooks nor Frye say more about this constitutive prolepsis, it is clear that
its resulting effect is a feeling of unfulfilled expectations.

There might not have been a better way for Conrad to frustrate the nineteenth-

century reader accustomed to realist narratives than by structuring his story
around the void of the missing central situation. Coming to Heart of Darkness
from the background of realist novels necessarily leads to a feeling of empty-
handedness. It is in this emptiness, Conrad’s novella suggests, in which we can
find the potential for a historically, and perhaps also ethically, more appropriate
narrative form.

6

Conrad, Heart, 70.

7

Ibid., 131.

8

Brooks, 247. Even though Brooks does not mention Wayne Booth’s famous remarks on Heart of Darkness, his

conclusions can be read as an answer to Booth’s questions about the relationship between Marlow and Kurtz. In
his Rhetoric of Fiction, Booth wonders if Heart of Darkness is a ‘‘story of Kurtz or Marlow’s experience of Kurtz’’.
In other words, he asks, ‘‘Is Marlow just a rhetorical device that heightens Kurtz’s moral collapse or is Kurtz
invented in order to provide Marlow with the core of his experience in Congo?’’ (Booth, 346).

Joseph Conrad and the Shift from Realism to Modernism

277

* * *

Even though Marlow warns his audience at the beginning that his story will be
imprecise and difficult to tell, Heart of Darkness exposes its semantic emptiness only
gradually and in direct proportion to Marlow’s growing interest in language and
eloquence. As Marlow slowly gets to understand that behind Kurtz’s articulateness
there is a feeling of inner emptiness, thereby realizing the hollowness of his verbal
fluency, the story is with an increasing intensity overtaken by the theme of silence.
What underlies, and later openly undermines, Kurtz’s verbal mastery, as well as
Marlow’s compulsion to tell a story—and, one could add, also Conrad’s
perfectionism in writing Heart of Darkness—is not a belief in the communicability
of their experience but rather in its stuttering aphasia. Instead of putting into words
the experience of its characters, Heart of Darkness stammers, trying to disclose their
experience while preserving its unutterability.

One does not have to go too far here: Kurtz’s famous cry ‘‘horror!’’ has an

expressive power and yet does not refer to anything specific. The irony of this scream
is, of course, that Kurtz is an eloquent speaker. Someone who is initially introduced
as a figure of wisdom thus surprisingly chooses to communicate his revelatory insight
not in an articulated language that would disclose it as a positively given message, but
as a cry. If this cry is the awaited central situation of the text, it is obvious why this
situation never arrives. The cry ‘‘horror’’ does not make anything intelligible, while at
the same time being exactly the centre around which Marlow’s story structures itself.
Since this cry indicates that in some situations denotative language proves
insufficient, Marlow’s whole narrative has to be read as a reflection of this revelation.
In this sense, Marlow does not talk in order to communicate meaning, but rather, by
means of elliptical language, enacts his experience of Kurtz and, furthermore, Kurtz’s
experience itself. On a demonstrative level, Heart of Darkness is thus simply a literary
correlate to Kurtz’s cry—it embraces Marlow’s recognition that in order to
communicate the experience of exploitation one has to undermine denotative
language. As Martin Ray succinctly puts it, if Marlow (and Conrad) wants to do
justice to Kurtz’s revelation, his narrative ‘‘must maintain language while acknowl-
edging that communication demands its extinction.’’

9

It is precisely this self-contradictory strategy of upholding language and

extinguishing it at the same time that Conrad saw as a potential answer to his call
for a new type of story. Both his genre experiments and his correspondence from the
turn of the century show that at a crucial moment when literary paradigms were
undergoing a radical transformation Conrad believed that the experience of
colonialism could not be reduced to an extralinguistic phenomenon, which would
be then described in language. Hence, Kurtz’s cry of the unnameable bears no
resemblance to the notion of the ineffable as conceived of by the Romantics because
from the point of view of the story, this cry represents quite literally nothing. As a

9

Ray, 51.

278

D. Just

literary counterpart to this ‘‘nothing’’ of Kurtz’s cry, the meaning of this novella
resides neither in the story, nor beyond its semantic void, but in this void. Heart of
Darkness serves to reveal that language must be systematically emptied out if
narrative literature is to find new, historically more adequate forms of representation.

* * *

What lies behind Conrad’s emphasis on semantic void is his conviction that cultural
values always tend to infiltrate literary discourse. This does not apply only to the old
values represented by the now disappearing Realism, but also the new values coming
with the end-of-the-century social transformations and finding their symbolic
representation in various soon-to-be Modernist techniques. Unlike Henry James,
Conrad, for instance, did not hurry to reflect social changes in the narrative
codification of the plurality of points of view—the ‘‘arranged alternation’’ of the
‘‘myriad of channels’’, as James explained his method.

10

Even though Marlow shows

the impediments that prevent him from giving a full report, this inability to clearly
tell a full story does not make his perspective limited or fragmented. Instead of
dividing narrative voice into several perspectives, Conrad tried to undermine realistic
verisimilitude by means of a narrator who is there only to show how language fails
him as he tries to tell a story. From the perspective of what Conrad was trying to
avoid, James’s ‘‘point of view’’ thus appears as not essentially different from the
omniscient narrator because both types of narrators, and thus narratives, reproduce
current cultural values.

With its structure, narrative techniques and authorial intention Heart of Darkness

falls neither into a Realist nor into a Modernist paradigm. It is also neither late realist
nor modernist avant la lettre, nor does it represent some strange mixture of these two
models. Instead of exemplifying some transitory phase in the transformation of
modern literature, as Luka´cs would want us to believe, this novella falls quite literally
in-between the paradigms. Considering Conrad’s literary as well as political concerns
at the turn of the century, this narrative has to be seen as a deliberately conceived
generic experiment in regard to both its historical place and its role in reflecting on
this place. As such, it helps to shed new light on the predominant interpretation of
the shift of narrative paradigms.

Inspired in many respects by Luka´cs, a widespread theory of the change from

Realism to Modernism argues for a more or less smooth transition in which
Modernism appropriates and cancels the principles of the preceding Realism. For
Jameson, for example, a Hegelian notion of Aufhebung as a sublation of the latter by
the former serves as the most appropriate description of the mechanism of this
shift.

11

In line with this interpretation, Jameson explains Conrad’s novellas as a

preparatory phase for the truly modernist techniques that Conrad developed later in

10

James, 301, 340.

11

Jameson, ‘‘The Ideology,’’ 57 – 68.

Joseph Conrad and the Shift from Realism to Modernism

279

his novels, or elsewhere sees these novellas simply as shorter novels that differ only in
scope. In the first case, Conrad’s novellas appear to be less mature than his novels and
therefore qualitatively different. In the second case, the question of genres loses its
importance; what matters is chronological development. Both of these scenarios
endorse a similar image of the paradigmatic transformation—novellas announce
modernist novels but their scope prevents them from giving full sway to modernist
experimentation.

Since examining the nature and the limits of the genre of the novel has been a

frequent literary and critical enterprise since at least Flaubert, not addressing the
question of genres, especially when mapping the situation of literature at the turn of
the century, is surprising. Even a theorist such as Jameson, whose approach often
emphasizes the importance of generic development and the way particular works
relate to the established pattern of genres, and who considers Conrad to be one of the
figures that signals a major change of paradigms in English literature, does not
discuss Conrad from the perspective of genre criticism. Instead, he compares Conrad
as a novelist to those writers who deployed similar literary techniques. Conrad is thus
associated with Flaubert in regard to the shift in narrative construction toward
‘‘personal style’’;

12

or, elsewhere, he is likened to Henry James and his technique of

enclosing the narrative perspective of the omniscient narrator into the monadic
consciousness of a fallible observer.

13

However, nowhere are these comparisons

supported by a consideration of the role of genres. It is only due to this limitation
that Jameson, as well as others, can describe the transition between Realism and
Modernism as an appropriation of the former by the latter.

To rethink the subject of the change of literary paradigms from the perspective of

genres allows for a more complex picture of this transition. And that is where Conrad
plays a crucial role. Representing a type of narrative whose primary aim is not to tell a
story but, instead, to show how one cannot tell a story, his novellas, and Heart of
Darkness above all, are far from merely standing in some nebulous zone between the
general oratorial paradigm and the practice of style as such. Even though this
formulation about the aim of Conrad’s novellas might resemble the rhetoric of
contemporary critical debates about testimony and witnessing, it must be emphasized
that for Conrad the difficulty of telling a story is not determined by the impossibility
of narrating certain events. Although the historical situation, and especially the
experience of colonialism, had major influence on his experiments with genres, this
situation itself did not stand for the ineffable object that the narrative vainly tried to
verbalize. Instead, the difficulty of telling a story was an outcome of a reflection on
the fact that the modern narrative discourse of the West had always failed to break
away from its ethnocentric thinking. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad tried to present a

12

Ibid., 22 – 3.

13

Jameson, ‘‘Romance,’’ 221 – 2, 231. To do justice to Jameson, in his comparison of Conrad’s techniques with

Henry James’s narrative codification of psychological autonomy, Jameson eventually offers a more nuanced
conclusion, pointing out that unlike in James’s narratives, with Conrad ‘‘the point of view becomes inseparable
from speech’’ (ibid., 224).

280

D. Just

narrative form that would both unmask the workings of this discourse and pose an
alternative to it.

* * *

What is it exactly that Conrad finds so disturbing about both the modern age and
the literature that reproduces it? Aside from literary and thus only indirect answers,
he addresses this question explicitly in the preface to The Nigger of the ‘‘Narcissus’’
(1897). In this text, he famously remarks that the modern scientific age produced
an image of nature that inconspicuously transformed our own self-perception.

14

Since the laws of nature as implemented by science are, as he claims, alien to the
deepest human concerns, our self-perception in such a science-oriented society
moved us away from our humanity. Conrad wonders if a society in which the
notion of personhood is understood in terms of a self-enclosed individuality does
not unavoidably lead to colonial expansionism. As in his letters to Garnett and
Graham, here also he suggests that writers have a duty to take a stance in regard to
current historical turns. Conrad himself, in order to account for the present
situation, looks for a mode of narration that would not reproduce the logic of
individualism to which modern society, as well as modern narrative, seems to tend.
But it still remains to be answered what makes the novella more suitable for his
purposes than the novel.

As Watt demonstrated in his celebrated The Rise of the Novel, the notion of the

individual—the one that Conrad sees as the core of the problem—gave rise not only
to modern culture, but also to the genre of the novel as its primary symbolic
representation. Since the novel, as Watt shows, both presupposes and utilizes the
operative notion of a separate individuality, Conrad opted for the novella when
looking for a narrative that would critically relate to the present historical moment.
Yet it was not only its cultural function that turned Conrad away from the novel. The
novel simply proved too profuse and complex to render the singleness of the effect
Conrad looked for. The novella’s brevity, seamless narrative continuity and a small
number of characters lent themselves more easily to this goal. The monothematic
nature of the novella—in which the theme, moreover, often points to ‘‘human
frailty’’

15

—allows it to contemplate a more abstract idea without playing it

extensively against reality in the manner of the novel. As J. H. E. Paine observes,
the novella’s economy of means and its more straightforward movement towards its
conclusion consolidate better the story’s structure and theme with its strict
causation.

16

Watt agrees that in Heart of Darkness it is precisely ‘‘the intermediate

scale of the genre [of the novella that] makes possible an ample, complex, but still

14

Ian Watt and Cedric Watts demonstrate in detail the extent to which developments in physical science,

thermodynamics, and evolutionary theory influenced Conrad’s writing (see Watts, 14 – 15; Watt, Conrad, 151 –
61).

15

Wasserstrom, xi.

16

Paine, 209.

Joseph Conrad and the Shift from Realism to Modernism

281

manageable unity of movement’’, and that serves as a medium of an uninterrupted
narrative flow.

17

If for Conrad the question of genres was essential to the goals he pursued in

each phase of his œuvre, only a genre-sensitive interpretation will reveal that his
novels and novellas have a very different relation to both the realist and the
modernist paradigms. Nostromo, for instance, is often seen as an example of the
early modernist novel because already in this work we can detect the kind of
novelistic self-reflection that is usually associated with the works of high
Modernism. In this sense, Edward Said rightly pronounces Nostromo as perhaps
the first novel that attempted to overturn the confident structural edifice
inherited from realist fiction.

18

However, unlike Conrad’s novels that illustrate the

early version of the modernist fragmentation of the notion of individuality, his
novellas comply neither with the fragmentation of this notion nor with the old-
fashioned depiction of the individual of the realist tradition. Instead, they try to
undermine this notion altogether. Perhaps most strongly of all his novellas, Heart
of Darkness offers something other than a symbolic representation of the
individual.

Being primarily an attempt to show what happens to the individual and the

culture that produces it when language loses its role as a transmitter of meaning,
Heart of Darkness stages the collapse of the individual as well as the collapse of
language as means of communication. Even though Heart of Darkness is full of
vivid descriptions and metaphors, neither denotation nor connotation can
explain the narrative. As Marlow tells his story, his descriptive language often
disintegrates into an impressionistic speech and his metaphors never remain
stable. Darkness, it will be recalled, is first introduced as a reference not to the
Congo but to England. As the story proceeds, it is with increasing frequency
related to colonialism rather than the jungle and the natives, thereby inverting
the alleged symbolism of the light of culture being opposed to the darkness of
Africa. Both the erratic speech and the unstable images help Marlow to tell his
story, but they at the same time make him fail. It is because of this failure that
the overall message of the book remains unclear—racism is both unmasked and
reproduced; Marlow presents himself as lacking eloquence, but in his ability as the
narrator he appears to be quite articulate; the book tells a story and yet its
techniques try to undermine storytelling. Rather than deficiency, however, the
failure to tell a story and offer an unequivocal message is the very essential failure
that the story of Heart of Darkness attempts to enact—a failure Conrad thought
was the only ethically acceptable response to the historical experience of
colonialism.

17

Watt, Conrad, 224.

18

Said, Beginnings, 137.

282

D. Just

* * *

Facing the apparent contradictions in Heart of Darkness, some critics were led to an
ambiguous conclusion that it is a story about the failure to tell a story, about the
difficulty in narrating certain events.

19

Only a few offer a reading that is closer to

the argument pursued in this article. Dominique Rabate´, to name one, suggests that
the problem Heart of Darkness represents is not the failed accomplishment of
language to give a report of something that proves to be impossible to narrate. The
purpose of this novella is not to render its object intelligible.

20

It has no wish, for

instance, to tell the reader about Kurtz, darkness, silence, solitude, or the irrational.
Instead, it is essentially a story that intends to show how language breaks down, that
is, not only the fact that language breaks down when facing the ineffable, but precisely
the mechanism of how it occurs. In this sense, the horror experienced by both Kurtz
and Marlow can emerge only as a consequence, and not the cause, of disintegrating
language. For, as Brooks perceptively notes, this tale passes only as a story, as a
‘‘passing-on of the ‘horror’’’, in the act of narration.

21

The challenge that Heart of Darkness poses to critical interpretations is precisely the

difficulty of preserving its ambiguity and therefore its stylistic uniqueness. Instead of
either demonizing Conrad as a racist (as Chinua Achebe does)

22

or, on the contrary,

celebrating Marlow’s discourse as one of alterity and Otherness (as Andrew Gibson
suggests),

23

the ambiguity of this novella comes to fruition only when considered

from a more general perspective of the development of the forms of narrative
literature. Such a critical method can account, for instance, for the political
motivations that triggered Conrad’s questioning of Realism and the genre of the
novel. Even though Conrad’s novels do not abandon the subject matter of the
Western explorations of the world, his novellas play a more radical role in the critique
of the impact of the Western industrial society. These novellas, far from being merely
personal testimonies about Western expansionism, expose the narcissistic nature of
modern Western culture.

It is unfortunately only for a brief moment that the anxieties and societal

contradictions inherent in the Western colonial culture were revealed in such an
unusually direct way. With the rise of Modernism, they were increasingly
downplayed or rationalized. What is thus perhaps the most important contribution
of Heart of Darkness to literary historiography is its exceptional historical place, one
that falls into a short interval between the shifting narrative paradigms. Leaving
Realism behind, while anticipating but not fully complying with the coming
Modernism, this novella offers a different picture of the changing paradigms than the

19

Todorov, 145 – 54.

20

Rabate´, 197.

21

Brooks, 260.

22

Achebe, 782 – 94.

23

Gibson, 113 – 37.

Joseph Conrad and the Shift from Realism to Modernism

283

one conceptualized by the notion of Aufhebung. What Heart of Darkness helps to
demonstrate is that Modernism, with its fragmentation of the omniscient narrator
and its assault on the authenticity of the narrative voice, is not really borne out of
Realism as its sublation. Instead, as a literary method, Modernism represents a
moment of already turning away from the abyss opened by the dissolved Realism.
Whereas Conrad’s novels epitomize an adaptation to the changes in the social realm,
the structural and thematic preoccupations of his novellas display a much more
ambiguous relation to these changes. For while his later novels adhere to the
conventions of modernist stylistics, the novellas preceding them reveal that there was
a ‘‘gap’’ in the development of narrative discourse—a moment of indecision and
paralysis after the dissolution of Realism and before the advent of Modernism.
Modernism, emerging paradoxically with Conrad’s own novels, slowly covers this
gap, gathering fragments of disintegrating Realism and developing a new form for
both the novel and the expression of modern individuality.

It is true that due to its stylistic and thematic ambiguity Heart of Darkness cannot

provide a definite condemnation of colonialism and therefore, as Said argues, does
not offer a ‘‘fully realized alternative to imperialism’’.

24

However, the question is

whether we do not miss something crucial about the nature and the historical
relevance of Conrad’s generic experiments if we see his works simply as an inadequate
criticism of his era. Although Conrad did not present any concrete alternatives to
imperialism, he did something that, even though arguably much less significant, was
nevertheless quite determinative for all subsequent attempts to find such
alternatives—he examined the parallels between the forms of power in society and
in literary discourse. Realizing the horrors of Western imperialism, but trying to
avoid the danger of minimizing them or distancing them in the pathos of the
nineteenth-century Realism, Conrad’s call for a different mode of narration was
driven by his belief that the question of an alternative to colonialism could not be
dissociated from its forms of symbolic representation. Ambiguity, that pervasive
feature of Heart of Darkness, is thus an unavoidable outcome of Conrad’s stylistic
choices. Techniques whose primary aim is to expose the mechanisms underlying the
dominant forms of the Western literary expression are, by definition, unsuitable for
being axiologically concrete. The question is not really whether Conrad failed to
develop political and social alternatives, but whether these alternatives could be
conveyed in the type of language he considered necessary in order to do justice to his
subject matter.

* * *

As a reflection of a relatively stabilized social world, the novel, Luka´cs argues, is
unable to offer the same insight into the changing narrative paradigms as the novella,
a genre that reflects a social world in transition. As a sign of the changing world, the

24

Said, Culture, 28.

284

D. Just

novella can be either a forerunner (the Nochnicht) or a rearguard (the Nichtmehr) of
the steady social world represented by the novel. But which novellas are the
testimonies of the disappearing past and which are the harbingers of the near future is
something Luka´cs does not explain. Why are Conrad’s novellas examples of the
former and those of Solzhenitsyn of the latter? Conrad’s novellas, indeed, reflect on
the disintegrating social world of the nineteenth century, together with Realism as its
narrative paradigm, but Luka´cs says nothing about the nature of this reflection.

If Luka´cs does not offer answers to any of these questions it is simply because after

the revelations of the crimes of Stalinism he does all he can to present Solzhenitsyn’s
novellas not as scathing critiques of the political practices in the Soviet Union, but as
narratives that, in however a laborious way, help to bring about the socialist future. If
the future here is socialist, Luka´cs gives an impression that in Conrad’s case it does
not matter much if his novellas are forerunners or rearguards—in both cases, both
the past and the future are bourgeois. What serves as a crucial conceptual distinction
for Solzhenitsyn therefore does not apply so much to Conrad. Strangely enough, for
Luka´cs there does not seem to be much difference between being a ‘‘No-Longer’’
realist or a ‘‘Not-Yet’’ modernist.

Even though Luka´cs agrees that genres play a substantial role in determining the

image of this transition, he applies to it the same Aufhebung concept as the critics
who either disregard the question of genres when commenting on this shift, or
address it against the background of the novel. By doing so, he misses something
crucial about the place of Conrad’s novellas in the development of modern narrative
literature. If from the perspective of the novel—or even, as Luka´cs implies, from the
perspective of the novella—the development from late Realism to early Modernism
looks as a continual transformation, Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness shows that
this shift was far from seamless. What Modernism had to patch over and dissolve in
its stylistic experiments was precisely what Heart of Darkness tried to expose, namely
the speechlessness in the face of Western atrocities. Only by laying bare an empty
abyss of language and not hiding one’s inability to tell a story, Conrad believed, could
one try to do justice to the negative effects of the narrow-minded and egocentric
cultural values. Without a doubt, Modernism was quite quick to overcome this
paralysis. Starting with Conrad’s own novels, Modernism promptly introduced a new
form for these values—a new form for the latest, modern type of individuality, as well
as a new form for the novel as its privileged expression.

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