White
Lies and Whited Sepulchres in Conrad's Heart of Darkness
Philip
V. Allingham, Contributing Editor, Victorian Web; Faculty of
Education, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario
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Although
numerous critics (including Johanna M. Smith, Peter Hyland, Herbert Klein,
and Garrett Stewart) have drawn attention to how Marlow's lie to the Intended
informs the whole preceding text and how that culminating scene with the
Intended is connected to Marlow's initial impression of Brussels as a whited
sepulchre (how appropriate in light of Belgian King Leopold II's hypocritical
defense of his private company's rapacious exploitation of the ludicrously-
named Congo Free State!), few have until recently focused on how the lie
affects the reader's reaction to Marlow as the protagonist and narrator of
Conrad's Congo tale. Answering
questions which the dead man's Intended poses him regarding the remarkable
Mr. Kurtz, Marlow does what he most despises. To protect both the integrity
of Kurtz's visions and the Intended's guileless love for the quondam
humanitarian Marlow acquiesces in her statements of faith ("his goodness
shone in every act" [Murfin ed. 92]), prevaricates with double meaning
("His end . . . was in every way worthy of his life" [93]), and
ultimately lies. "There is a taint of death," the death of moral
integrity, "a flavour of mortality in lies -- which is exactly what I
hate and detest in the world -- what I want to forget" (41). Marlow has
returned to Brussels "hoping to surrender to her the memory of Kurtz.
She instead maneuvers him into telling her a lie: that Kurtz's last words
were not 'The horror,' but her name" (Moser 79). Ironically, Marlow
finishes his story of African adventure at the point where Kurtz's career in
crimes against humanity in all likelihood began, with a rationalization, a
justified lie. In fact, it is the lie that renders this another of Charlie
Marlow's "inconclusive experiences" (21). What
if the Company's real objective were wealth derived from a trade in bones? --
the fragile veneer of western civilisation, the great white lie of the White
Man's Burden with its implicit, pseudo-altruism, must be accepted if the
natives of the dark continent are to be improved, enlightened, and
transformed into white people with black skins. Such a parcel of lies,
exposed in their naked contumely through the course of the narrative, Marlow
has found "appalling," yet he now countenances his own untruth to
the Intended on similar grounds, to preserve an ideal image that should be
revealed as hollow. To tell Kurtz's fiancée the truth "would have opened
the bleakness of his heart to her view; and she would have known the depths
to which he had sunk" (Dowden 82). The
countenancing of the greater evil, the lies like rainbow colours on the \
Company's map veiling the real motives of European imperialism in Africa, is
behind both the thoughtless misbehaviour of those "jolly pioneers of
progress" (24) and "emissaries of light," the
ironically-dubbed "pilgrims," and the calculated reign of terror
that Kurtz directs against the neighbouring tribes. Enthralled by their own
money-lust (which, as Lionel Trilling observes of late nineteenth-century
American society, is "the father of ultimate illusion and lies"
[110]), the Europeans disregard both the natives' interests and their own
moral well-being as they monopolize the ivory trade. The very air seems to
sigh "ivory," and the only earthly reason Europeans in the Congo
can give for being out there is "To make money, of course" (35). However,
it is not corporate profits but the welfare of the natives that Kurtz's
Company has used back in Europe to justify its presence and activities in
central Africa. Before he came face to face with his own base passions and
atavistic drives there, Kurtz the journalist espoused those same altruistic
ideals (which Marlow satirizes as "the noble cause" [23] and
"the cause of progress" [24]) that his employers have mouthed in
order to mitigate enslaving the natives to facilitate their obsessive quest
for gain. As
in Conrad's "An Outpost of Progress" (1896) the manager's lofty
intentions for his work at the jungle station were quickly perverted by the
Darwinian ethos of the unfamiliar climate and environment, which shattered
Kurtz's shallow European principles, leaving him the mere hollow shell of a
civilized, rational being. "In the wilderness Kurtz's integrity
collapses; only the extremes of appetite and intellect, of savagery and
idealism survive" (Lynn 22). Conrad makes plain the moral bankruptcy of
the system for which Kurtz stands by connecting him with Brussels, the
"city of the dead" (25) that in Marlow's reminiscence epitomizes
European civilisation: "a city that always makes me think of a whited
sepulchre" (24). In
the above description Conrad alludes to Christ's characterization of his
opponents, the New Testament's Pharisees, as "whited sepulchres, which
indeed appear beautiful (i. e., “virtuous,” in Christ's context) outwardly,
but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness"
(Matthew 23: 27) spiritually. What the Saviour found so objectionable in his
sectarian adversaries is what Marlow finds so repulsive in the Belgian
company: sheer hypocrisy. Just as the Pharisees maintained that they were
solely concerned with the spiritual health of the people of Israel but acted
out of self-interest, so the Company hides its appetite for wealth and power
behind empty platitudes about advancing the light of European civilisation
through the darkness of the African jungle, and "'weaning those ignorant
millions from their horrid ways'" (26). When
Marlow describes his city of departure . . . , white is immediately
problematized for the reader. The color acquires not only sepulchral
connotations but also moral dubiousness, Marlow's description recalling the
Biblical phrase for the hypocrite, the man of inner darkness whitewashed by
outer manner and conventional deed (Rosmarin 161). If
Brussels seems a whited sepulchre and the Company presents an enlightened
façade, the interior reality is Mr. Kurtz, behind whom lurk death and
desolation. The marble fireplace of the Intended's parlour possesses a
"cold and monumental whiteness" (90), connecting this particular
European interior with the general exterior of the society. The white of the
middle-eastern tomb's exterior is the white of the African ivory,
superficially attractive (in fact, the tombs were white-washed in order to be
highly visible so that orthodox Jews might avoid ritual defilement by
unwittingly coming too close): the inner truth is the stench of bones. Given
over to the powers of darkness, Kurtz cannot restrain himself from misusing
the tools afforded him by his race's superior technology -- "the
thunderbolts of that pitiful Jupiter" (75) -- and assuming godhead. He
becomes a savage better only in fire-power than those with whom he is in
league. His sociopathic tendencies being given full play, Kurtz mercilessly
murders and pillages to provide his firm with his quota of tusks -- most of
it, significantly, disinterred "fossil." The savagery behind the
whole European commercial endeavour in Africa is symbolized by the whitened
skulls which ornament the pilings of his stockade like nobs on newel posts in
respectable European homes. The
closing scene of The Heart of Darkness , Marlow's interview with the
dead man's white Intended (a pale figure of delusion juxtaposed against the
black Athena who had usurped her place for Kurtz at the Inner Station),
leaves the reader with ambivalent feelings about Conrad's chief narrator. To
his male auditors aboard the ‘Nellie' Marlow denies that his
"trifle" (94), his gift of unspotted memory of her beloved, was of
any significance. Although he is trying to spare her further anguish, he is
simultaneously denying that the evils which Kurtz, the Company, and the
pilgrims committed in the heart of darkness are still taking place. In fact,
even after the follies -- "the merry dance of death and trade" (28)
-- he has witnessed in Africa, Marlow values European colonialism as
stabilizing -- "There was a vast amount of red -- good to see at any
time, because one knows that some real work is done in there" (24).
Although he admits the debilitating effects of civilisation on the Congolese
(even the muscles of his cannibal crew are gradually deteriorating under its
influence), Marlow sees the system as setting positive constraints ("a
butcher round one corner, a policeman round another" [63]) to individual
conduct. Even in "the sepulchral city" (87) which he loathes,
Marlow sees the virtue of a system that permits people "going about
their business in the assurance of perfect safety" (87). He justifies
his personal commitment to the former, unreal, idealistic and idealized Kurtz
by describing his impending lie as resulting from "an impulse of
unconscious loyalty, or the fulfilment of one of those ironic necessities
that lurk in the facts of human existence" (89). One must wonder if the
sort of lie that Marlow tells Kurtz's Intended was the same first step that
Kurtz took on the path to self-destruction at the Inner Station. Like
Willa Cather's protagonist in her psychological study "Paul's
Case," Kurtz and Marlow have looked into that dark place in the human
psyche and know what lies there. Buddha-like, Marlow has come back from near
death on the Stygian shore to tell the world (in his mind, apparently a male
construct), but feels an almost boyish reticence about revealing the horror
of the darkness to the woman. Does he, as Moser has suggested, allow himself
to be maneuvered into lying out of an outmoded, chivalric regard for the
lady's sensibility, or does he feel that she is unworthy of (or incapable of
understanding) the truth as it revealed itself to him through Kurtz at the
heart of darkness? Or does he believe that someone must have his or her
innocence maintained in order to sustain a worthwhile ideal that animates a
workable system? "If he had told the girl the simple facts,"
asserts Walter F. Wright, "he would have acknowledged that the pilgrims
in their cynicism had the truth, that goodness and faith were the
unrealities" (159). Or is the lie an affirmation of Marlow's fellowship
and solidarity with Kurtz, whom Marlow feels that he has no right to condemn?
The
answers to Marlow's motivation are to be discovered in the nature of the lie
itself and in the nature of the liar. Lies, of course, have proven
indispensable to fabulists ever since Cain lied to God in Genesis and
Odysseus slipped out of one disguise into another in The Odyssey . But
Marlow's lie is neither as wicked as Cain's (especially since it acknowledges
his need to be the keeper of his spiritual brother's memory) nor as
self-serving but justifiable as Odysseus's. At first glance there is neither gain
to be achieved nor pain to be avoided in Marlow's lying to the Intended.
Marlow's lie is neither the cowardly evasion of Cain, whose conduct evokes
the reader's scorn, nor the cunning imposture of Odysseus, whose studied
impersonations and self-control call forth the reader's admiration. Marlow's
lie we judge as neither premeditated nor wilful. Rather, readers never doubt
for a moment that, in Marlow's place, they would likewise have spared the
Intended's feelings and made her a present of Kurtz's final words. And that
is precisely the effect for which Conrad is striving: we would do just what
Marlow did, even though, as moral, decent people, we too abhor lying and
deceit. And yet we would be wrong, for in shielding her from the truth about
her fiancé Marlow is also insulating her from the Darwinian reality behind
not only the African jungle, but also behind Brussels' impassive façade. If
Kurtz's Intended represents bourgeois European society, then Marlow has just
joined those devious political and commercial interests who are keeping the
middle-class consciousness from apprehending the European exploitation of
Africa for what it is: a cultural, economic, and geographical rape. "The
Intended [and, by implication, European society as a whole] remains as unknowing
of the truth as she always has, and remains a part of the foreboding darkness
with which the story ends" (Montag 97). As a gentleman, Marlow feels
that women are to be protected and insulated from any unpleasantness; as a
closet misogynist, he states that "the women are out of touch with
truth" (27), that they are an intellectually inferior, impractical
species incapable of dealing with any reality, let alone the brutal reality
of the Belgian fiasco in Africa. Through keeping Kurtz's Intended from the
truth of his death Marlow reinforces his own chivalric image of himself: he
would rather be chivalrous and lie than be cruel and tell the truth,
recognizing how sustaining for her will be the illusion of a noble, sane,
humane Kurtz. While Homer's epic voyager never has to lie to himself, even
though he lies out of self-defense many times to others, Conrad's reflective
mariner has trapped himself into doing and being what he detests, and, in
doing so, has also lied to himself about his motives. It
seems an innocent, benignly-motivated deception, a mere 'white lie', but, as
Rosmarin points out, in Heart of Darkness white is the "the most
explicit confusion" (161) for the reader, since it is an
"off-color," the hue of ivory (upon which the whole European economic
venture rests) and of Kurtz's complexion, a muddied, sullied white that,
again to quote Rosmarin, "bespeaks contamination, a mutual transference
between the spheres of morality and vision, between the self one is and the
self one seems to be" (162). As
the story unfolds, Marlow reverses the normal symbology of the black-white
dichotomy, so that gradually darkness comes to mean truth, whiteness
falsehood. Ugly and harsh -- black -- as the undisguised version of Kurtz's
death would have been for her, without facing "the horror" of the
darkness the Intended will never be free of her illusions about the man to
whose memory she has consecrated with nun-like devotion (as suggested by her
mourning dress over a year after his death) the rest of her life. Conrad's
subtle insistence on the whiteness of her forehead suggests that Marlow
subconsciously now sees whiteness "as a symbol of all those who suffer
self-deception as well as a symbol of all those who practice
self-deception" (Brady 25). The implications for the complacent, white,
middle-class, and emphatically male readers of Conrad's Congo tale in the
patriarchal journal Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine are obvious. We are
brought to the realization that the pathways of the African jungle and the
streets of Brussels, jungles and buildings, heat and cold, mysteries and
commercial enterprise, are, as W. F. Wright remarks, mere symbols of
"the larger darkness, which is in the heart of man" (160), a
darkness in which lies the potential for evil and for good. References
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Marion B. "Conrad's Whited Sepulcher." College English 24, 1
(October, 1962): 24- 28. Conrad's
Heart of Darkness and the Critics ,
ed. Bruce Harkness. Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth, 1965. Dowden,
Wilfred S. "I Start with Definite Images." Joseph Conrad: The
Imagined Style . Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1970. Pp. 39-
102. Hyland,
Peter, "The Little Woman in the Heart of Darkness ." Conradiana
20, 1 (1988): 3-12. Joseph
Conrad: Heart of Darkness, A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism , ed. Ross C. Murfin. New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1989. Klein,
Herbert G. "Charting the Unknown: Conrad, Marlow, and the World of
Women." Conradiana 20, 2 (1988): 147-158. Lynn,
David H. " Heart of Darkness : Marlow's Heroic Cry." The
Hero's Tale. Narrators in the Early Modern Novel . London: Macmillan,
1989. Pp. 1-27. Montag,
George E. "Marlow Tells the Truth: The Nature of Evil in Heart of
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Garrett. "Lying as Dying in Heart of Darkness ." PMLA 95
(1980): 319- 331. Trilling,
Lionel. " Huckleberry Finn ." The Liberal Imagination:
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