Paul Wiles' Essays


Conrad: Isolation and Communication

by Paul Anthony Wiles

Chapter 3

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The themes of alienation and the possibilities of communication, in terms both human and artistic are not only concerns of the modernist writer, but themes in which Conrad, as an expatriate, an exile, had a degree of personal involvement. Writing in a foreign language – and critics have pointed out on numerous occasions that his style is unusually ‘pure’ in that it is completely free of any local idiosyncrasies – must have made him doubtful of the exact value of words in describing reality. His doubts of their exact mimetic function (if indeed they could be said to have such properties) echo the modernist faith that words have moved away from the reality they are purporting to describe, rather than being at one with them and the artist/reader having no conception of the actual word, only the thing it describes. He shares too a readiness, in the face of such recalcitrant language, to turn to image and symbol to communicate with the reader those truths, or meanings that words are unable to convey. Here there operates a fine balance: whilst much of Heart of Darkness relies on a stock of symbol and myth that is Conrad’s invention, he prevents the narrative becoming a completely ‘closed’ work (one that offers the reader no set of values with which to evaluate the novel other than those given in the narrative – in this sense becoming ‘self-referential’) – by appealing to the shared elements of the literary culture, the symbols and myths alluded to as the ‘common stock’ above.

The nihilistic vision of Heart of Darkness and of his letters cannot, however be solely attributed to his childhood and his self-imposed exile; far more important was his conscious philosophy. In the letter already quoted, Conrad notes with profound dismay, that, ‘we, living, are out of life’: our ways of coping with reality are so inadequate as to leave them with the sense of being divorced from it. Marlow’s ‘inconclusive experiences’ in Heart of Darkness and in Chance his belief in ‘…inability to interpret aright the signs which experience (a thing mysterious in itself) makes to our understanding and our emotion…’ – both point to man as not only alienated from his society, but also isolated from his experiences. As an artist, however, Conrad is aware that his readers expect him to transmit meanings and truth in his work, truths, which can never be forthcoming. To him there seems no artistic form confident enough appropriate to his dark vision in his earlier work. If he is to avoid silence, (which could deny his role as an artist in a very obvious manner) he must find an adequate vehicle. He does try to forestall the reader’s demands for meaning by breaking time schemes and presenting multiple points of view, a series of shifting perspectives, all of which militate against the imposition of a coherent meaning on the narrative.

In this sense, Conrad is plagued by the modernist agony of the contradiction between what Hillis Miller describes as ‘light and darkness, motion and stillness, silence and speech, meaning and meaninglessness, servitude and freedom, time and eternity’ (Poets of Reality, p.85). An examination of Heart of Darkness shows the oscillation between the contradictions and yet there is much else in the narrative that suggests at least the possibility of ‘a retreat from irony’.