Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer (23 page)

This personal anecdote has a powerful relevance to Conrad's work, it seems to me. The two tales you have found in this book were written ten years apart (
Heart of Darkness
was written in 1899, and
The Secret Sharer
a decade later) and they differ markedly in style, yet they are connected by virtue of sharing one of Conrad's most crucial themes: a haunting and accidental union between two people who by all rights should never have met, and who have—often incomprehensibly—the power to change each other in radical ways.

Conrad leaves a deep mystery at the core of the special relationships that drive these two tales. We are never directly instructed as to why the Captain feels such a deep kinship with Leggatt, his ‘‘secret sharer''; even more difficult to fathom is Marlow's psychological imprisonment within the ineffable relationship he forms during his brief exposure to the monstrous Kurtz. Indeed, the great challenge with which Conrad leaves us, as readers, is to come to some sort of conclusion on our own about these dark intimacies, to figure out what happens inside a person's consciousness when he is altered by the personality of someone else.

These relationships are vague in origins but quite tangible on the page. While Leggatt is still clinging to the ship's ladder and glowing with the natural phosphorus of the sea, our unnamed Captain remarks that ‘‘a mysterious communication was already established between us two.'' This mysterious communication will lead the Captain first to extend toward Leggatt a puzzling degree of blind trust and second to take extraordinary risks on his behalf.

Similarly, on meeting Kurtz (who is, like Leggatt, a murderer, but on a far larger and more ferocious scale), Marlow finds himself inexplicably drawn to him. ‘‘The volume of tone he emitted without effort, almost without the trouble of moving his lips, amazed me. A voice! A voice! It was grave, profound, vibrating, while the man did not seem capable of a whisper.'' (Notice that, as with all subsequent descriptions of his exchanges with Kurtz, Marlow reveals almost nothing of the actual content of the conversation.) Just after this first meeting, Marlow is approached by the loathsome company manager, whom we might call a petty bureaucrat supervising the plunder and rape of a continent and who wishes to go on record as deploring Kurtz's ‘‘unsound methods,'' even as he profits by them. Marlow recalls with disgust that he ‘‘had never breathed an atmosphere so vile, and I turned mentally to Kurtz for relief—positively for relief.''

In both stories, then, we see formed a profound bond based on little available information or personal context, but rather some invisible but irresistible moral imperative, some core and highly mysterious requirement of being human. Written very close on the heels of
Heart of Darkness
, Conrad's great novel
Lord Jim
—which also features Marlow as narrator—has a moment that sums up this mystery in a brilliant and almost incoherent and wordless moment. Jim, a criminal like Leggatt and Kurtz, comes to understand the bond that has formed between Marlow and himself, and all that Marlow has done for him, and he stutters, in shock, ‘‘I—you—I . . .'' These might be the three words and two dashes that in all of Conrad best evoke his central artistic and moral concern.

If we are going to understand the bond between these figures, it is important to look at how the stories are told.
The Secret Sharer
is told in direct first-person narration, but the story belongs to Leggatt—it is his conundrum that drives the plot. For all the Captain's maneuvering to protect Leggatt, the Captain is not the doer of this story, but the teller, and as he relates to us, the readers, Leggatt's story and the Captain's own complex psychological reaction to it, a similar bond is formed between narrator and reader as was formed between the two characters in the tale.

Heart of Darkness
multiplies this implied morality of narration, if we may call it that, many times over. Indeed, it is a frequently noted characteristic of
Heart of Darkness
that we have to do significant analysis just to determine what the story actually is, and who is actually telling it. The telling begins, as it were, on the deck of the cruising yawl
Nellie
²
, where four friends who were once men of the sea and who still enjoy sailing together are waiting at the head of the Thames for the tide to turn. The reader is addressed by an unnamed narrator, who sets up the situation before Marlow starts to speak. Everything that Marlow will say will come to us through this other narrator whose name we never learn.

So we can fairly easily see a three-layered narrative structure that goes from Marlow, to his companion, to us. But is this really Marlow's story? Or is he not in a similar role in relation to the real story here as the Captain is in
The Secret Sharer
? This is Marlow's story of
hearing
a story.

Conrad was by all reports a man who was uncomfortable in society, awkward, shy, and gloomy. Later biographers have revealed that he was subject to fits of temper that led him to be abusive to his family. He never lost his thick accent, although he had done the heretofore unimaginable feat of being a foreigner certified as a captain in the British Merchant Service. It is not clear why he chose, among his five or six languages, to write in the one he learned latest in life: English.

This drama of language and culture and belonging also has its play in
Heart of Darkness.
You'll recall that Conrad goes across to ‘‘the Continent,'' to ‘‘the sepulchral city'' to gain employment, with the help of his aunt. The city in question is Brussels, and the country is Belgium, which controlled (with unparalleled brutality and savage looting) the entire Congo region. These facts indicate a powerful atmospheric and literary situation that Conrad never once makes explicit: that Marlow, an Englishman, has spent this entire story, until he reaches Kurtz, among French speakers. In addition to the other narrative complications we've explored, we must add the fact that the story has been ‘‘translated'' by Marlow from French into English, that it took place, as it were, in French. And when Marlow considers why Kurtz has bestowed on him all Kurtz's horrible visions, he concludes that it was ‘‘because [he] could speak English to me.'' So the painful, ruinous, almost lethal redemption that Marlow implicitly claims for himself—having undergone something like Kurtz's own trials and lived to tell of them—resides not only in the successful conveying—the honest evocation—of the story, but in the English language itself. Knowing as we do the facts of Conrad's life—his parents' early deaths after imprisonment by the Russians; his travels; his time on the sea—there is something very moving about his profound connection to the English language, to his commitment to it as a vehicle of redemption, even for Kurtz, who, having finally found an English speaker, is freed to tell his horrifying truth.

Speech, indeed, is a specific and timely savior. When Marlow rises at midnight and discovers that Kurtz has left the ship, and finds him in the tall grass trying to return to the tribesmen who are loyal to him, Marlow succeeds in stopping him by saying, ‘‘ ‘You will be lost . . . utterly lost' '':

That this unlikely intimacy would endure, long past Kurtz's death, and transform Marlow, becomes the reason why he tells the story to others—each new listener presumably influenced by his own sense of intimacy with Marlow and with his own capacity to change. The story Marlow ‘‘hears'' is Kurtz's story. Marlow never really tells us what that story is:

The story resides in the end ‘‘at the heart of an impenetrable darkness.'' The story is all of Europe at its most corrupt. The story is the ruination of a once-fine (though highly mistaken) European intellect; it is the absolute debasement of a self-serving high-mindedness. The story is brutality and madness on a scale and of a depth even greater than what a nineteenth-century Englishman would attribute to a shaman wearing antelope horns and dancing around a fire. The story is the savagery not of ‘‘the savages'' but the savagery that Marlow discovers (and that Conrad himself discovered in the Congo, a life-altering experience that helped make him into writer) hidden in the darkness inside each of us, our original and most human inheritance. Most of all, for Conrad, the story is the moral achievement, amid all that debasement and violence and terror, residing in Kurtz's peculiar ability to
convey
all of this, all of the madness and lust and savagery. By being able to speak it, to show it, he is somehow redeemed: he is ‘‘a remarkable man.''

That is the ‘‘story'' of
Heart of Darkness
and you really don't get to it until the very end. Indeed, we journey toward it in a structural way—from the
Nellie
to Marlow to Kurtz—that is almost miraculously mirrored in the structure of the story itself, which travels from Europe up the Congo River, stopping at the Outer Station, the Middle Station and the Inner Station, where we find Kurtz, and ivory in unimaginable quantities, and destruction, and speech.

—Vince Passaro

Selected Bibliography

Almayer's Folly: A Story of an Eastern River
, 1895 Novel

An Outcast of the Islands
, 1896 Novel

The Nigger of the ‘‘Narcissus'': A Tale of the Sea
, 1897 Novel

Tales of Unrest
(‘‘Karain: A Memory,'' ‘‘The Idiots,'' ‘‘An Outpost of Progress,'' ‘‘The Return,'' and ‘‘The Lagoon''), 1898 Short Stories

Lord Jim: A Tale
, 1900 Novel

The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story
(with Ford Madox Hueffer), 1901 Novel

Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories
(‘‘Youth,'' ‘‘Heart of Darkness,'' and ‘‘The End of the Tether''), 1902 Novel

Typhoon and Other Stories
(‘‘Typhoon,'' ‘‘Amy Foster, '' ‘‘Falk,'' and ‘‘To-morrow''), 1903 Short Stories

Romance: A Novel
, 1903 Novel

Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
, 1904 Novel

The Mirror of the Sea: Memories and Impressions
, 1906 Travel Writings

The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
, 1907 Novel

A Set of Six
(‘‘Gaspar Ruiz,'' ‘‘The Informer,'' ‘‘The Brute,'' ‘‘An Anarchist,'' ‘‘The Duel,'' and ‘‘Il Conde''), 1908 Short Stories

Under Western Eyes
, 1911 Novel

A Personal Record
, 1912 Autobiography

'Twixt Land and Sea: Tales
(‘‘A Smile of Fortune,'' ‘‘The Secret Sharer,'' and ‘‘Freya of the Seven Isles''), 1912 Short Stories

Chance: A Tale in Two Parts
, 1913 Novel

Within the Tides
(‘‘The Planter of Malata,'' ‘‘The Partner, '' ‘‘The Inn of the Two Witches,'' and ‘‘Because of the Dollars''), 1915 Short Stories

Victory: An Island Tale
, 1915 Novel

The Shadow-Line
, 1917 Novel

The Arrow of Gold: A Story Between Two Notes
, 1919 Novel

Notes on Life and Letters
, 1921 Memoir

The Rover
, 1923 Novel

The Nature of a Crime
(with Ford Madox Ford [né Hueffer]), 1924 Novel

Suspense: A Napoleonic Novel
(incomplete), 1925 Novel

Tales of Hearsay
(‘‘The Warrior's Soul,'' ‘‘Prince Roman,'' ‘‘The Tale,'' and ‘‘The Black Mate''), 1925 Short Stories

Last Essays
, 1926 Essays

The Sisters
(begun 1896, incomplete), 1928 Novel

Three Plays: Laughing Anne
,
One Day More
, and
The Secret Agent
, 1934 Plays

Congo Diary and Other Uncollected Pieces
, 1978 Travel Writings

Batchelor, John.
The Life of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography
. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.

Billy, Ted, ed.
Critical Essays on Joseph Conrad
. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.

Bloom, Harold, ed.
Joseph Conrad: Modern Critical Views
. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.

Bode, Rita. ‘‘ ‘They . . . Should Be Out of It': The Women of
Heart of Darkness
.''
Conradiana: A Journal of Joseph Conrad Studies
26:1 (1994), 20-34.

Burden, Robert.
Heart of Darkness
. The Critics Debate Series. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991.

Conroy, Mark.
Modernism and Authority: Strategies of Legitimation in Flaubert and Conrad
. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.

Greaney, Michael.
Conrad, Language, and Narrative
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Hamner, Robert D., ed.
Joseph Conrad: Third World Perspectives
. Washington, DC: Three Continents, 1990.

Hawthorn, Jeremy.
Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment
. London: Edward Arnold, 1990.

———.
Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad
. London: Continuum, 2007.