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THE WOMEN DO NOT TRAVEL: GENDER, DIFFERENCE, AND INCOMMENSURABILITY IN CONRAD'S HEART OF DARKNESS

Gabrielle McIntire
It is a story of the Congo. There is no love interest in it and no womanonly incidentally. Joseph Conrad, "To Fisher Unwin."

Despite Joseph Conrad's anxious confession to his publisher T. Fisher Unwin in 1896 that there would be "no love interest [. . .] and no woman" in Heart of Darkness, or at least "only incidentally," the novella he produced two-and-a-half years later is radically preoccupied with women and the ways they influence his "story of the Congo" (199).Yet Conrad allows women scarcely any narratological or thematic attention in Heart of Darkness; instead, women appear to function primarily as ancillary details to Marlow's narration about Kurtz and his adventure to the "heart" of Africa. However, despite women's near invisibilitya half-presence that echoes the text's preoccupation with shadows and darknesses1 they are an always-palpable presence in the background of the text.They tropologically illuminate the relationships of difference and distance that
MFS Modern Fiction Studies,Volume 48, number 2, Summer 2002. Copyright for the Purdue Research Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

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Conrad establishes between Europe and the Congo, and they figurally represent the incommensurability between different ideologies and different genres of speaking and knowing that are so central to the text's status as a framed oral narration. The women of Heart of Darkness have, in fact, suffered from a double invisibility. First, Conrad invites his readers to participate in Marlow's insistence that the women are "out of it" (49) by figuring women as palimpsestic, ghost-like, half-presences. At the same time, the women of the text have remained nearly invisible because so few critics have chosen to examine their roles; when women are considered, critics have focused mainly on Marlow's lie to Kurtz's Intended. Once we begin looking (and we do have to look to find them), no less than eight women are present in Heart of Darkness: the Belgian aunt who secures Marlow a job when his prospects for work in Europe are exhausted; the two women sitting on "straw-bottomed chairs, knitting black wool" who appear to Marlow in the Company offices as guardians of "the door of Darkness" (14); the "wife of the high dignitary" to whom Marlow's aunt recommends him for employment in Africa (15); the African laundress for the Company's chief accountant, who keeps him looking like a "vision" or a "miracle" (21); the "wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman" (60) at the Inner Station who "rushed out to the very brink of the stream" (66) as Marlow leaves with Kurtz on board his steamer;2 Kurtz's mother, who dies shortly after Marlow returns to Belgium (70); and finally, Kurtz's Intended, the woman he might have married, whom he "intended" to be his final interpreter, and the woman to whom Marlow lies at the very end of the text.3 What is going on with these women? Perhaps most clearly, Conrad associates women with the cultures and geographies they inhabit as though by contiguous extension. The principal women of the text are always positioned in transitional spaces in either the colony or the metropole, while they are decidedly static and unable to wander between cultural, ideological, and national boundaries, as do Marlow and Kurtz. In terms of Marlow's understanding of his voyage, the women are neither here nor there;or rather, they are only ever here or there, since they are powerless to transgress the limit that such a boundary implies. Mostly the women are sedentary, stationary, and confined to their own territories, metonymically embodying the separate cultural, racial, and

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geographic identities at play in the novel. The aunt sits in her uppermiddle-class domestic parlor in Belgium as she sends Marlow off to his adventure in Africa; the two knitting women sit in the outer room of the Company offices and glance at the men en route to the Congo; and, at the end of the text, Kurtz's Intended receives Marlow in a "lofty drawing-room" (72) where they both "sat down" for their mournful exchange (73). Even the movement Conrad grants to the African woman at the Inner Station only further emphasizes her essential immobility: she struts along the river bank as she wails at Kurtz's departure, but she, too, is confined to her own territory. Placed as they are, Conrad's women reinforce a sense of extreme separation between the colony and the metropole, and as such they are crucial for guarding and preserving difference between Africa and Europe. Kurtz's aunt embodies whiteness as well as the racist politics of the European colonizing mission, while she also represents the ignorance of the sedentary white Belgian masses that do not and cannot participate in Marlow's knowledge of the "dark" continent. Marlow's aunt is evidently very comfortable, ensconced in privilege, and capable of serious influence with people such as "the wife of the high dignitary" of King Leopold's Belgian Congo. Before he leaves for Africa, Marlow finds her "triumphant" as she praises his work for the Company, and they drink tea during "a long quiet chat by the fireside." Marlow, however, only mocks her flattery, considering her as a carrier for the ethics of the colonizing mission. In one of the many moments in the text when Conrad reveals his famous attention to the power of the written word, Marlow declares that his aunt has been sufficiently influenced by the "rot let loose in print and talk just about that time" to gain the sort of limited, ideologically saturated and very public knowledge of colonialism the Company wishes the general populace to possess (1516).4 Suggesting both familial rootedness and European cultural supremacy, the aunt upholds the "decency," order, calm, and "triumph" of the metropole without moving beyond the domestic space of her own parlor.5 Despite differences of race and place, yet with striking similarities in terms of her rootedness, the African woman at the Inner Stationthe "wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman" who mirrors the "sorrowful land" (60)emblematizes and helps to inscribe the racist distinctions the text has already established between the colonial vision of native

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"savages" awaiting exploitation and the civilizing mission of the colonists, the white "emissar[ies] of light" (15). Marlow describes her in terms of her physical beauty, her warrior-like posture and clothing, and her indecipherable language. Distinct from the ugliness of the white women who knit in the Company's officesthe "slim one" with a "dress as plain as an umbrella cover" (13) and the "old one" with "a wart on one cheek" (14)the black native woman is granted a sexual and valuable body: she is "gorgeous," and laden with costly ornaments that "jingle and flash" as she moves in her slow procession. But while her beauty and confidence distinguish her, she too is restricted to her own territory, and Marlow describes her with a simile that links her to the land she represents, as though by contiguous extension: in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul. She came abreast of the steamer, stood still, and faced us. Her long shadow fell to the water's edge. Her face had a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and dumb pain mingled with the fear of some struggling, half-shaped resolve. She stood looking at us without a stir and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose. (60) In more than one sense her valuable body "mirrors" the body of Africa and its "dark" wilderness that the colonists are plundering as they scramble for their hoards of ivory, for Marlow anthropomorphizes the wilderness at the expense of the woman by figuring her as co-extensive with place: both she and the land convey "sorrow," while the land itself "seemed to look at her" as though it were looking at itself. Conrad thus bestows at least as much agency on the land as he does on the woman herself. Nevertheless, the African woman is given an important signifying power since as she struts along the river bank, holding "her head high" (60), she represents the absolute distance and incommensurability between Marlow's colonial river steamer and her people's land, which she guards even as she later gives a fervent and sorrowful "send off" to Kurtz. Marlow

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tells his auditors that when she concluded her exchange of glances, "[s]he turned away slowly, walked on following the bank and passed into the bushes to the left. Once only her eyes gleamed back at us in the dusk of the thickets before she disappeared" (61). Marlow's orientalizing terms here invoke visions of a valuable and hunted animal retreating back to its camouflaged zone of protection: she disappears into the thickets to resume her spatial identification with the "dark" territory. That is, just as Marlow earlier feminizes the wilderness that surrounds the isolated colonial stations along the Congo by describing them as "clinging to the skirts of the unknown" (36), the African woman here "passe[s]" back into the feminized indecipherability of the unknown which defines her.6 In contrast, at no point in the text are the colonists themselves identified with the land of the Belgian Congo. Instead, the Congo always remains a discrete territory, epistemologically distanced from the possibility of European identification. In this sense Conrad critiques the colonial project by suggesting that colonists are always interlopers on the space of others. Frantz Fanon would propose many years later that "[f]or a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity" (44). Conrad perverts this relation between the land and its people by problematically implying a fantasy of extension between race, gender, and territory to propose, in effect, that race and gender are the motherland. However, neither women nor natives ever control the land, nor does it grant them "dignity." Instead, the inscrutability of Africa's wilderness becomes another metaphor that repeatedly reinforces both the literal silence of its inhabitants, and their imagined ignorance. In an excellent article that does consider a range of female figures in Heart of Darkness, Bette London suggests that in Conrad's text we need to "consider gender and race as interlocking systems whose mutually authorizing relationships support the dominant cultural perspective" (235). The dominant cultural perspective is, of course, colonial imperialism, and Conrad uses race and gender together to enforce the distinct alterities between Belgium and the Congo and colonizer and colonized that a model of colonial subjugation demands for its successful operation. In similar terms, Jeremy Hawthorn proposes that "in Heart of Darkness issues of gender are inextricably intertwined with matters of

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race and culture" (183). Even so Conrad's placement of women in these fixed and liminal territories goes further than merely accentuating the differences and distances between Africa and Europe: it also emphasizes important incommensurabilities between different modes of knowing, speaking, and experiencing. That is, while Conrad's text explicitly marks out incommensurable differences between Europe and Africa and between Europeans and those he calls "savages," these geographic and racial differences are sustained and enforced by the incommensurabilities in knowing and speaking that he establishes along gender lines. Part of what is at stake in Marlow's narration and his brief but recurring attention to women is a need to distinguish two entirely different communities of people predicated on modes of knowledge and experience. The male protagonists possess both empirical and abstract conceptual knowledge of the colonial enterprise in both Africa and Europewhile the five major women of the text (Marlow's aunt, Kurtz's Intended, the African woman, and the two knitting women in the Company offices) apparently possess only conceptual knowledge of either Africa or Europe. Because of his aunt's acceptance of the public ideologies in support of colonialism, Marlow claims that women in general are out of touch with truth [. . . .] They live in a world of their own and there had never been anything like it and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation, would start up and knock the whole thing over. (16) Instead of reading his aunt's complicity with the Company project as metonymically representative of the ethics of the colonizing mission which he does elsewherehe reads her indoctrination as a specifically feminine ignorance.This "world" of women that Marlow imagines is distinguished by its non-relation to "truth" and its excessive concern with aesthetics over practicality. In contrast, the "men" Marlow refers to as "we" (effectively interpellating both his audience on the Nellie and Conrad's early male readers) possess a sufficiently accurate version of the "facts" about the daily business of colonization to make theirs a world that does not "fall apart"to use both Yeats's and Achebe's important

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phraseat least not until well into the unimaginable twentieth century.7 The functional world that men have constructed abides by a utilitarian and empirically tested logic simply because it pursues its ends effectively. It recognizes such details as the "fact" that the Company is "run for profit" (16). The world Marlow imagines for women, however, is distinct from that of the men who actually go to the "heart" of the "dark" continent to set up their version of a "world" insofar as it is fixed, static, and domestic: neither the women's world nor the women themselves can migrate to different territories or do more than manage the incommensurable differences of colonial order that Marlow and Kurtz confront as they travel. That is, neither women nor Africans (regardless of gender) are capable of navigating between types of knowledge any more than they are capable of leaving the territory that defines them. Just as his aunt functions for Marlow as a metonym for all women who are ignorant of the "truth" and are miserably "out of it" (49), his profound misanthropy for the population that remains in Europe centers on his scorn for their ignorance, such that his misanthropy parallels his misogyny. He comments scathingly and condescendingly on the people he sees in the streets upon his return to Belgium: "They trespassed upon my thoughts.They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew [. . . .] I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces so full of stupid importance" (70). Accusing them of "trespass[ing]"an offence he is guilty of in far more literal measure in the Congohis disdain for the people he sees in the streets in Belgium occurs precisely because of their lack of knowledge, as we come to realize that the key conflicts of Heart of Darkness are delineated along epistemological lines. In a text that is on a very fundamental level about language and its limits, narrativization and narratability, and speech and speakability, some of the terms Jean-Franois Lyotard sets up in The Differend: Phrases in Dispute might help us diagnose how Conrad's constructions of gender, genres of knowledge, and modes of speech mutually reinforce the distance and incommensurability between the male and female "worlds" of Heart of Darkness. Lyotard suggests that a differend marks the failure or impossibility of translating one rhetorical or speech genre into another. He writes: "The differend is the unstable state and instant of language

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wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be. This state includes silence, which is a negative phrase, but it also calls upon phrases which are in principle possible" (13). I want to propose that the incommensurability between Marlow and the women of his narration reveals a differend that in turn elucidates the more general incommensurability between modes of knowing and speaking in the text. As I will show, the women participate in and inhabit a different discursive genre from men since they are most often silent, uncomprehending, and indecipherable. Lyotard further proposesin terms that echo Conrad's articulation of the different "worlds" and "universes" of the sexesthat a differend describes "[i]ncommensurability, in the sense of the heterogeneity of phrase regimens and of the impossibility of subjecting them to a single law [. . .]. For each of these regimens, there corresponds a mode of presenting a universe, and one mode is not translatable into another" (128). In Heart of Darkness, Marlow's narrative mode of speech presents and reveals a "universe" in which women are untranslatable and quite literally unable to be told. Marlow is only capable of reading them as metaphorical and meets a limit precisely because he cannot translate them to the real.8 Later in the novellaafter Marlow has claimed that his aunt and women in general are "out of touch with truth" (16)he pushes this exclusion further to insist, with an intratextual echo of his own words, that women should be "out of" his whole story. In the middle of his description about his steamer's dangerous approach to the Inner Station he happens to mention "the girl," but then catches himself: "I laid the ghost of his gifts at last with a lie," he began suddenly. "Girl! What? Did I mention a girl? Oh, she is out of it completely.Theythe women I meanare out of itshould be out of it.We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own lest ours gets worse. Oh, she had to be out of it. You should have heard the disinterred body of Mr. Kurtz saying 'My Intended.' You would have perceived directly then how completely she was out of it." (49) Quite strikingly, his insistent repetition in this passage that women are "out of it" marks one of the few places in the text when Marlow interrupts his narrative with an aside to his auditors. Indeed, he stutters and

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falters in his narration most explicitly at the moments when he is unable to make women a part of his story. Here he "suddenly" stops the articulate flow of his yarn to revise his own terms and preoccupations by asserting that women are not simply of a different world, but ought to be "out of" the story "completely." His tangent is so filled with hesitations and dramatic caesuras that his very language betrays how unsettling women are to Marlow's order of things: as figures that cannot quite make their way into narration, or even into language, they resemble Lyotard's differend because they present a problemnot simply of translation, but of an epistemological incommensurability with Marlow's genre of telling and knowing. His repeated insistence that women are "out of it" ought to alert us to the fact that they might be more important to his story than he allows. Marlow's repetitive insistence on women being "out of it" actually seems to betray his own anxiety regarding women as guardians of difference and players in his own destiny, since they are, in fact, overly imbricated in his story. He confesses this predicament to his fellow sailors with embarrassment: "would you believe it?I tried the women. I, Charlie Marlow, set the women to workto get a job. Heavens!" (12) Here he must not only repeat the personal pronoun, "I," but he feels compelled to name himself to the others in order to stress his own astonishment, to perform his alienation from ostensibly unusual behavior.Without his aunt's intervention, Marlow would never have gained his appointment to the river steamer in Africa in the first place; his aunt is, quite significantly, partly responsible for originating his story. Not only are women "out of touch with truth," but Conrad also constructs the women of his story in terms of a different discursive genre from the men in Heart of Darkness. In contradistinction to Kurtz's "folds of a gorgeous eloquence" (72), and Marlow's exquisite narration to his fellow sailors that takes place with scarcely a pause, the women's narration and their very narratability are severely restricted. Not a single woman has a name, women scarcely speak, and when they do speak they are misunderstood, deliberately misled, or represented as profoundly lacking a comprehensive understanding of the events in which they participate. The only women of the text who are granted a decipherable language are Marlow's aunt and Kurtz's Intended, and they are the only two with whom Marlow converses. Johanna M. Smith argues that Marlow

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chooses not to "silence" the Intended and the aunt simply because he "needs them for his speech: by mocking the lack of worldly experience which their words convey, he can recuperate that experience as a manly encounter with truth. By having them feebly echo the case Kurtz has made for imperialism, he can reverse the powerlessness evinced in his response to Kurtz's eloquence" (189). In contrast, the African woman is powerfully granted sounda point I will return to laterthough for Marlow the sound of her wailing is closer to the "howl" of the "bush" (46) that eerily takes his crew by surprise than it is to language. In The Differend one of Lyotard's principal concerns is to explore how parties within discursive encounters involving heterogeneous "phrase regimens" are divested of the possibility of communicating, and are therefore "reduced to silence" (10). While he is interested especially in the philosophy of language and its discursive systems, he also includes a deeply ethical and political dimension to the differend, claiming, "What is at stake in a literature, in a philosophy, in a politics perhaps, is to bear witness to differends by finding idioms for them. In the differend, something 'asks' to be put into phrases, and suffers from the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases right away" (13). Without framing his argument in feminist, queer, or racial terms, Lyotard goes very far in describing how institutional and societal modes disallow certain forms of speech or genres of expression by not making space for the possibility of their idiom. That is, a differend occurs not simply when voices are not heard, but because those voices cannot be heard.The voices Lyotard writes of are as unintelligible to the more powerful discourses that frame and contain them (whether these are legal discourses, or whether they involve an exchange in which one of the partiessometimes a prioriis refused the chance for self-articulation) as the women in Heart of Darkness are to Marlow's narration.9 For the majority of the text we do not and cannot know why women partake so completely of a different epistemological framework than the men, and it seems that Marlow is quite happy to allow this difference (which generates a differend) to remain unchallenged. He has virtually no desire to explore the incommensurabilities between their systems of knowledge and his own, establishing himself instead as an "Enlightened" reader, as Bette London points out, and "the voice of cultural authority" (241). That is, he is capable of distinguishing between

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epistemes while confidently remaining within his own. While his aunt is making him "quite uncomfortable" with her nave praise of the Company's project, for example, lauding their efforts to "wean those ignorant millions from their horrid ways," Marlow only ventures a "hint that the Company was run for profit" (16). He stops short of a full explanation of his views, which he narrates to his male auditors, and he only weakly expresses his discomfort through the always-ambiguous gesture of a hint. Marlow thus not only allows his aunt to misread his own ambivalence about the Company's capitalist ventures, but he seems to wish this misreading upon her. He considers her, as with the Intended at the end, incapable of knowing. If we move backward into Heart of Darkness with the teleology of Marlow's lie in mind, the narration's dependence on a complex series of differends becomes increasingly apparent. Not only is Marlow unable to read womeneffectively structuring them as a differendbut he also disdains women because of their perceived inability to recognize the incommensurabilities at the heart of the darkness of Africa. Perhaps the most shocking example of the distance Conrad creates between Marlow on the one hand and women and Africans on the other occurs when Marlow meets Kurtz's Intended after his voyage to Africa and finds himself unable to translate the excess of his experience into intelligible words. Despite Marlow's stated disgust for lies (29), and his claim to have been searching both for "the truth of things" (17) and "truth stripped of its cloak of time" (38), he chooses to lie when the Intended asks him for Kurtz's final words. The phrase Kurtz repeats as he dies"The horror! The horror!" (68)becomes for Marlow another metonym for the untranslatability and inexplicability of his experience of Africa. They are Kurtz's words, simultaneously and ambiguously alluding to his horror of his own tyranny, his horror of a continent in miserable subjugation, and possibly to the horror of his vision of death, but Marlow makes them his own.As Michael Levenson suggests, Kurtz's phrase involves "the productive confusion of two realms: personal agony indistinguishable from political catastrophe" (5). Kurtz's repetition becomes Marlow's private refrain for Africa, which he refuses to share with Kurtz's Intended, and presumably shares for the first time when he narrates it to his fellow sailors. Even when he does narrate his tale to his male audience, we should keep in mind that Marlow relates it in a trance-like state, with a "hesitat-

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ing voice" (11), as though he only finally tells it (or confesses it) in spite of himself. Indeed, the frame-narrator describes the group onboard The Nellie in terms suggestive of altered or religious states of consciousness, thus supplementing Marlow's story with the impression that an occult transmission of knowledge is taking place: the listeners themselves "felt meditative," and, in terms that orientalize Marlow for a change, before Marlow begins his story he "sat cross-legged right aft, leaning against the mizzenmast. He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, a straight back, an ascetic aspect, and, with his arms dropped, the palms of hands outwards, resembled an idol" (7). At the close of his story Marlow is even more deeply associated with a religious and, in this case, a philosophic figure : "Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha" (76).

Sometimes Marlow is, in fact, quite self-consciously aware of the authority of his position and his voice, claiming that "for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced" (38). In terms of Lyotard's model of "phrases in dispute," the silence of women stands out ever more starkly because of its extreme opposition to Marlow and Kurtz's command over language. Marlow speaks directly from the metropolitan center of the British Empirehis narration literally takes place on the fluid, shifting territory of the Thames, just upriver from Londonwhile he repeatedly reminds us how important his English-ness is to his adventures. The English language provides the common linguistic ground between him and Kurtz, allowing Marlow to converse fluently with Kurtz, a man who is known for "his ability to talk, his wordsthe gift of expression" (48). Marlow remarks: This initiated wraith from the back of Nowhere honoured me with its amazing confidence before it vanished altogether. This was because it could speak English to me. The original Kurtz had been educated partly in England, andas he was good enough to say himselfhis sympathies were in the right place. His mother was half-English, his father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz; and by and by I learned that, most appropriately, the International Society

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for the Suppression of Savage Customs had entrusted him with making a report, for its future guidance.And he had written it too. I've seen it. I've read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence. (50) Kurtz's familial genealogy of partial Englishness is what allows him to communicate with Marlow, just as Marlow's national English and continental family connections allow him to encounter Kurtz at all.Appropriately, Kurtz is something of a cultural hybrid: his roots lead to a mixed European ancestry (Marlow does not narrate what the "other" parts of Kurtz's descent are), while he apparently had travelled to Africa out of an "impatience of comparative poverty" (74). Conrad thus links Kurtz and Marlow through the particularity of their shared background and experiences, through their association with the "new gangthe gang of virtue," since they were both recommended by "the same people" (25), and through the fact of their wandering. Marlow is "a seaman, but he was a wanderer too." He has a marked difference even from his fellow sailors to whom he relates his tale because, unlike them, he "still 'followed the sea'" (9). To reinforce Kurtz and Marlow's parallel need for adventure and travel, Conrad later intratextually echoes the narrator's observation that Marlow is a "wanderer" by describing Kurtz as a "wandering and tormented thing" (65). Marlow is a displaced Englishman who must rely on a female relative in Belgium to secure him a job, while Kurtz is a displaced citizen of all of Europe. Kurtz and Marlow's intimacy then springs up in part from their mutual love of what douard Glissant calls "errantry." Errantry, for Glissant, is "not rhizomatic but deeply rooted: in a will and an Idea" (41), and in contradistinction to mere "wandering," errantry aligns itself with the abstract telos of an Idea. Before Marlow even meets Kurtz he is told that Kurtz "had come out equipped with moral ideas of some sort" (33). Marlow, in turn, wills to understand the incomprehensible Idea of Africaand, ultimately, of Kurtz himselfand he fantasizes that travel will provide him with this knowledge.What Marlow actually comes to "know" during his voyage is unclear, and Conrad seems to want to leave the markers of truth or discovery ambivalent. Just as Marlow conveys that before he knew Kurtz "[h]e was just a word for me" (29), Marlow agonizes over the fact that his narration may appear to his audience as simply an inchoate string of words. He asks: "Do you see him? Do you

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see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream" (30). Kurtz and Marlow "see the story" because they possess a shared vision of the atrocities of deep colonial Africa in which they both participate in different ways. At the same time, Kurtz and Marlow's all-male community of knowledge is semi-marginal and always on the move.They seem to participate, at least tentatively, in what Jean-Luc Nancy calls "being in common." This "has nothing to do with communion, with fusion into a body, into a unique and ultimate identity that would no longer be exposed. Being in common means, to the contrary, no longer having, in any form, in any empirical or ideal place, such a substantial identity, and sharing this (narcissistic) 'lack of identity'" (xxxviii). Neither Kurtz nor Marlow has the type of static identity that Marlow criticizes in women, and concomitantly, they shift locales endlessly precisely because they cannot discover what Nancy calls one's own "ideal place." Even when it appears that Kurtz may just have discovered his "ideal place" by tyrannically controlling a station far enough down river to put him beyond the precincts of Company control, Marlow enforces his retrieval mission to dislocate Kurtz from his usurped African territory.The "lack of identity" they share is predicated on both their errantry and on Marlow's narcissistic understanding of Kurtz's final words, as Marlow seems to believe that only he can interpretively grasp the brilliant logic in Kurtz's pathetic cries that point to no particular referent. Following Nancy's terms, however, their community ultimately fails because of Marlow's excessive identification with Kurtz and his homoerotic desire to possess the "truth" singly about Kurtz, and frantically exclude it by lying to Kurtz's Intended. Marlow's misogyny then depends on an important distinction between "wanderers" and those who stay at home. In contrast to the homosociality of Marlow and Kurtz and the ways in which they are narrated as wanderers who become "friend[s]" (62) that partake of an "unforeseen partnership" (67), the women of the text remain geographically, ideologically, and culturally stationary and isolated. While Heart of Darkness is critical of the grand narratives of colonialism, pointing out the "darkness" at the heart of the colonial project and critiquing the empty desires of the Company "pilgrims," Conrad nevertheless valorizes Marlow's form of wandering.Yet Marlow does not travel to Africa to understand another culture, but rather to satisfy his childhood "han-

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kering" to explore what had been "the biggestthe most blank" (11) space on the world map, even though "It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names" (1112).10 Unlike the (problematic) birth of anthropology, when, as douard Glissant proposes, "[u]nderstanding cultures then became more gratifying than discovering new lands" (26), Marlow's voyage is rooted in a childhood fantasy of discovering the unknown promised by the unwritten cartography of the blank map. His adult voyage to the Congo is his attempt to actualize this abstract desire for knowledge by supplementing it with the empirical experience that will allow him not simply to name but to narrate this blank space. As Conrad writes in "Geography and Some Explorers," one of his autobiographical Last Essays, "the honest maps of the nineteenth century nourished in me a passionate interest in the truth of geographical facts and a desire for precise knowledge" (qtd. in Kimbrough 145; emphasis added). His concerns with honesty, truth, facts, and knowledge are precisely the issues that the women of Heart of Darkness help to illuminate by their very exclusion from these spheres.

While women do not wander in Heart of Darkness, and Conrad does not grant them the possibility of grasping the Idea of colonial exploration, the women are nevertheless crucial for sending off the men to their travels. In one of the important send-offs of the text, where women are placed in liminal positions yet are unable to transgress the boundaries between here and there, Marlow exchanges meaningful glances with two mysterious women who knit black wool in the Company's head offices.These women occupy a transitional space in the labyrinthine headquarters: they are outside the waiting room and the inner office, yet inside the Company, and they are some of the last faces the young "foolish" men will see before leaving for Africa (14). Inhabiting an ambiguous position, these women are at once comforting and sinister. On one level, their knitting seems more appropriate to a domestic space of semileisure than to a space of business, and the women provide a last glimpse of "home" for the men who cross their threshold, complete with a cat who sits on the older woman's lap. But, at the same time, they are reminiscent of the three fates of Greek myth who weave and unweave destinies regardless of individual wishes.11

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Significantly, Marlow's exchange with the two knitting women occurs in glances, without wordsjust as the indecipherable send-off by the African woman at the Inner Stationwhile it leaves an indelible mark on his consciousness that involuntarily returns to haunt his memory in Africa. He describes his visit in these terms: [The older woman] glanced at me above the glasses.The swift and indifferent placidity of that look troubled me.Two youths with foolish and cheery countenances were being piloted over and she threw at them the same quick glance of unconcerned wisdom. She seemed to know all about them and about me too. An eerie feeling came over me. She seemed uncanny and fateful. Often far away there I thought of these two, guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool as for a warm pall, one introducing, introducing continuously to the unknown, the other scrutinising the cheery and foolish faces with unconcerned old eyes. "Ave! Old knitter of black wool. Morituri te salutant." Not many of those she looked at ever saw her againnot halfby a long way. (14) Marlow must quite literally navigate his way through the glances of these women to approach the center of the Company, while, sitting on the outskirts of the Company offices, the women also function as the European gateway to the subjugated Congo.They are strangely "unconcerned" and distinctly unattached to Africa. The women quite incommensurably knit wool, as though for a cold climate, indicating their indifference to the fates of the men who pass them by. Nevertheless, Marlow conjectures that the women knit "black wool as for a warm pall," inviting us to imagine that they are knitting feverishly because they sit at the door of death, preparing palls to cover the dead as they return from the heat of Africa to the chill of Europe. Linguistically, too, Conrad links them to the colony with his word play on the "feverish[ ]" (14) pace with which they undertake their task. In practical terms, however, they are doing the wrong thingracing against a time that both means everything and nothing once Marlow reaches Africa, where the lack of basic materials (rivets) delays his retrieval of Kurtz for months, rather than hours or days.Apparently, as Conrad shows us, the colonial system of extraction was so profitable that it could af-

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ford to be badly organized.The two women eerily possess a commensurate and fateful knowledge of the men who pass them by, and they exhibit an ironic efficiency in their "feverish" pace to provide materials for the dead. Are these women, then, figures of knowledge? Is Conrad offering a deconstruction of Marlow's terms whose logic states that women are "out of touch with truth"? As with the other women of the text their knowledge can only be conceptual, but it nevertheless leans toward experience since it can be none other than the knowledge of the probability of death. This "fateful" knowledge momentarily links them with the community of men who pass through their offices, and provides the closest encounter between Marlow's versions of "male" and "female" forms of knowledge that the text will allow. The Latin Marlow uses to apostrophically address the women "Ave! [. . .] Morituri te salutant" (14)conveys strangeness, difference, and the solemnity of death in a tongue belonging to the early Roman "conquerors" to whom he refers at the beginning of his narration (10). Marlow and these knitting women are, in this specific moment, separate communities, functionally communicating because of their mutual access to the knowledge of death and a foreboding sense of "Darkness." Paradoxically, the women here disclose both a differend and a moment of commensurability: their gendered community is opaque and unsettling to Marlow, yet Marlow's phantasmatic Idea of the "Darkness" of Africa momentarily appears to correspond with their Idea of Africa as a place that sends back the dead. That is, the women who "knit," "glance," and "introduce" have a peculiar epistemological access to the "Darkness" that they guard, though their imagined Idea will necessarily be incommensurate with the particularity of the lived experience that unfolds for Marlow. Marlow's encounter with these women is disturbing enough that this image later returns to his memory, as though from the repressed, to "obtrude" itself on his thoughts precisely as he crosses the boundary from the river (his steameras the metropole framed by the dark continent) to the bank (the native territory, the unknown, the unexplored) in pursuit of the escaped Kurtz. As Marlow remembers remembering the womenin a moment that reminds us that this is a text about memorythey no longer seem as apposite to the Darkness that they guard, and Marlow, in effect, takes back his earlier intimation of their knowledge: from the vantage point of experience the older woman appears only within the

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context of some fleeting "imbecile thoughts" as "a most improper person to be sitting at the other end of such an affair" (64). Marlow disdains European women because they seem debilitatingly unable to know difference; they are unable to conceive of the proliferation of differends that mark Kurtz's summation of "the horror." At the same time, Marlow extends his critique of the limits of women's knowledge to Africans, and specifically to African women. He places the two African women that he encountersthe laundress and the woman at the Inner Stationinto similar categories of non-knowledge as the European women.The laundress of the "Company's chief accountant" (21), just as the "savage" "fireman" who stokes the furnace aboard the river steamer (38), is "useful" only insofar as she has "been instructed" (39), for she possesses no real relationship to subjectivity or the power attendant with critical knowledge. Yet Marlow admires the fruits of her labor, and he comments at length on details of the accountant's appearance, for which she is responsible: I met a white man in such an unexpected elegance of get-up that in the first moment I took him for a sort of vision. I saw a high, starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clean necktie, and varnished boots. No hat. Hair parted, brushed, oiled, under a green-lined parasol held in a big white hand. He was amazing and had a pen-holder behind his ear. I shook hands with this miracle [. . . .] Yes. I respected his collars, his vast cuffs, his brushed hair. (21) Does this not remind us of the terms Marlow criticizes his aunt for using, when she imagines Marlow as "[s]omething like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle" (15)? Is Marlow not guilty of the same type of aestheticizing that he complains makes women incapable of setting up a world? What is Conrad ironizing? Perhaps Marlow's need to segregate women's knowledge is rooted in his wish to distance himself from a recognition that their "feminine" way of experiencing the world at times infects his own epistemology. The women's knowledge that he observes is alternately "out of touch with truth," "fateful," instructed, and also incomprehensible; in other words, women's knowledge is very much like Africa itself for Marlow.

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The woman at the Inner Station also seems to possess and mark a knowledge of her own, insofar as she performs the sentiments of her tribe in her "articulate" send-off to Kurtz. She is an untranslatable fixture of her geographical locale who nevertheless possesses an uncanny knowledge that Marlow himself cannot comprehend. In terms reminiscent of the two knitting women, she appears to Marlow as one who "looks" (60) and "glances" (61) at the Company men who pass before her eyes. She guards her territory as a sentry: her demeanor is "warlike" (60), she has a "helmeted head" (66), and, like the younger knitting woman who walked "back and forth introducing," she walks along the bank "from right to left [. . . .] with measured steps" (60). Marlow notes, without additional commentary on its significance, that she moves in a counterclockwise direction, perhaps insisting on her inversion of Western European order, although her movements are ordered and precise. While Marlow tries to decipher her movements, her glances, and her shrill criesall gestures outside of language for himhe is forced to confess that she remains incomprehensible. Just after he first narrates her appearance on the river bank, associating her at once with danger, Marlow relays the harlequin's account of an episode involving her and Kurtz a few days earlier: "Luckily for me, I fancy Kurtz felt too ill that day to care, or there would have been mischief. I don't understand . . . . No it's too much for me. Ah, well, it's all over now " (61). Her incomprehensibility leads the harlequin, too, to the stuttering and hesitating silence of a differend where, as Lyotard suggests, one epistemological and discursive genre is "not translatable into another" (128). The next day when the steamer pulls away with Kurtz on board, the African woman shouts out "something" and "all that wild mob took up the shout in a roaring chorus of articulated, rapid, breathless utterance." Marlow asks Kurtz if he understands their cries, and Kurtz merely responds, "Do I not?" (66) Kurtz, however, does not translate for Marlow, and Conrad leaves the meaning of their cries undefined. Perhaps they are shouting Kurtz's name, or something equally impossible for Kurtz to misunderstand. All that is clear for Marlow, and hence for us, is the fact that their protest against Kurtz's departure occurs through sound and language. They are powerless now to take up a physical fight, and hence their protest must come through words alone.Yet Marlow is again left unable to read either women or Africans with any precision. And these failures of communication do

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not stem simply from a lack of translationwhich does not signify a differend for Lyotard (157)but from Marlow's interpretation of their world as more commensurate with the "heavy, mute spell of the wildernessthat seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast" (65) than with his own genre of knowing. Indeed, women are frequently figured very much like the wilderness itself in Heart of Darkness, as Conrad consistently associates women not only with the land they inhabit as guardians, but also, in the case of Africa, with the silence, shadowiness, and indecipherability they share with the colonial territory. Both women and the wilderness provide a backdrop to the narration, a figurative ground on which the male action is superimposed. From the beginning of his tale Marlow consistently and repetitively describes the Belgian Congo as a mysterious and dark place full of silences, participating in a European fantasy that the African wilderness was, as Ian Watt argues, "by definition an extreme example of a place where the light of civilization has not come; and Africa, for this and other reasons, long figured in European thought as the Dark Continent" (Conrad in the Nineteenth Century 250). Early on Marlow remarks, "the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion," while, like a mother, "the wilderness without a sound took [the beaten "nigger"] into its bosom again" (26; emphasis added). Later on the wilderness is "great, expectant, mute" (29; emphasis added), a "rioting invasion of soundless life" (32; emphasis added), and "[a]n empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest" (35; emphasis added). These associations of the wilderness with silence and muteness carry right through the text. As such, the wilderness is figured as a major marker of Africa's subjection: a geography, space, and history that quite literally cannot be heard, yet which nevertheless possess a mysterious, indecipherable "hidden knowledge" that is "mute" but "with an air of whisperingCome and find out" (16). And this is where the wilderness is, in fact, a step up from women: it possesses secrets worth discovering, while women's silence is representative of nothing more than lack and absence. Interestingly, Conrad associates Kurtz as well as women with the wilderness.When Marlow's allegiances are beginning to shift to Kurtz he tries to disclaim his new loyalties to his auditors, insisting that "I had

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turned to the wilderness really, not to Mr. Kurtz who, I was ready to admit, was as good as buried. And for a moment it seemed to me as if I also were buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets" (62). Of course Marlow does not literally choose the wilderness; if he chooses any "wilderness" at all, it is only the "wilderness" of human experience and its extremes. And he makes his revulsion from the wilderness clear in a series of dizzying and slippery tropes that disclose an intense corporeal fear of being swallowed up by this "silent" land that is figured so much like the women of the text. He moves rapidly from claiming an allegiance to the "wilderness" to imagining not just Kurtz but he himself as "buried" by the wilderness, as though togetherin a homoerotic burialthey would be entombed by the land that fascinates them. Nor does he simply envision a scene of interment in the African ground; rather, he imagines "a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets," as though the earth itself were a repository of hidden knowledge, ready to incorporate their two bodies that have thirsted for its secret. At the very end of the text, Marlow's desire for non-contact between his epistemological framework and women's in general is highlighted when he chooses to lie to Kurtz's Intended. Marlow's desire to visit her has been piqued by Kurtz's "small sketch in oils" of the Intended"a woman draped and blindfolded carrying a lighted torch" (27)that Marlow first sees at the Central Station before he meets Kurtz. The portrait of a deliberately blinded woman who nevertheless functions as a carrier of light draws together Marlow's general characterization of women as blinded, ignorant, and yet oddly capable of illuminating the way into darkness, offering a parallel with his aunt's procurement of his position and with the ways the women of the story illuminate the epistemological structures and concerns of Heart of Darkness.12 Always one step away from truth and knowledge, women can reflect their light, but not know where they walk. Importantly, the painting also operates as a symbolic point of currency for Marlow since together with Kurtz's letters, the blinded figure of liberty provides a connecting bridge between Marlow and the Intended, and gives him a reason for visiting her. Marlow chooses to visit her on the pretence of returning what is rightfully hersto "give her back her portrait and those letters myself"while he simultaneously admits that his move is made equally out of "[c]uriosity," and a desire "to surrender personally all that remained of [Kurtz] with me," including "his memory" (71).

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When Marlow does visit the Intended, he is capable only of returning the portrait and her own letters, not of giving her Kurtz's final words; he can return things, but he cannot meet her with language.Their dialogue takes place in a chiaroscuric setting of half-lights and shadows, and as elsewhere in the novella Marlow describes the Intended in terms that suggest she is co-extensive with her physical environment.The room they sit in has a "tall marble fireplace [that] had a cold and monumental whiteness. A grand piano stood massively in a corner with dark gleams on the flat surfaces like a sombre and polished sarcophagus" (72), and the room grows increasingly "dark" as their conversation about Africa and Kurtz progresses.The Intended herself is still in mourning and dressed "all in black," yet she is also aligned with whiteness; she possesses a "pale head" (72), "fair hair," a "pale visage," and she "seemed surrounded by an ashy halo" (73).13 The Intended is predictably eager to hear all that Marlow has to tell about Kurtz's last days. But even though Marlow has already pronounced that "as it turned out [he] was to have the care of [Kurtz's] memory" (51), he is unwilling to share either memory or truth with this woman. If Marlow is to insist on meeting Kurtz's Intended only in the language of lies, it appears he must foreclose communication altogether. Rather than giving the Intended the dignity of a conversation, he mimics her phrasing in a bizarrely sadistic wrestling match that belittles her desire for knowledge of her once future husband.14 In answer to her statement, "You knew him well," he echoes her in profoundly homoerotic language, "I knew him as well as it is possible for one man to know another" (73). His echolalia effectively parodies her desire for knowledge about nothing less than knowledge itself by claiming a supreme (and possibly sexual) form of knowledge for himself. He has already conveyed a stuttering erotic homage to Kurtz that insists upon their eternal "intimacy," claiming that in his first words to Kurtz Marlow said the "right thing," just at the "very moment when the foundations of our intimacy were being laidto endureto endureeven to the endeven beyond" (65). As their exchange continues he finds her responses deeply troubling and finally bars communication with her altogether, recognizing in the "appealing fixity of her gaze" (73) the same language of "glances" he so detests in other women. As Marlow is struggling to piece words to-

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gether in the hesitating language of discomfort, claiming "He was a remarkable man [. . . .] it was impossible not to . . . . ," the Intended interposes "Love him." This statement works simultaneously as a command, as an assertion of her own love for Kurtz, and as an attempt to meet Marlow on his own discursive level by literally completing his sentence to join his genre of praise. By echoing him in the language of love and desire, however, the Intended pushes his remembrance of Kurtz to its passionate and epistemological limits: her conclusion is precisely the sort of thing Marlow does not want to hear from a woman; it is far too near to the "truth" about his attachment to Kurtz. Marlow experiences this interpolation as a terrifying shutting down of his voice, feeling that she was "silencing me into an appalled dumbness" (73).This is, of course, a distinctly feminine position in Heart of Darkness, and, along with the sudden revelation of her uncanny knowledge, produces a discomfort from which Marlow will be unable to recover. After a few more moments of an awkward, hesitating dialogue in which Marlow expresses a palpable jealousy for the Intended's devotion to Kurtz and her assurance of their mutual love, Marlow tells her that he was with Kurtz "[t]o the very end [. . . .] I heard his very last words," but then suddenly "stopped in fright." The Intended, of course, asks him, with childlike repetitiveness, "Repeat them [. . . .] I wantI wantsomething somethingtoto live with" (75). Again she is asking to participate in his language, to know the words he carries as memory. Marlow, however, is incapable of speaking. Rather than tell her the truth of Kurtz's astonishing last words, and thus uphold his promise to Kurtz to communicate his story to her on a decipherable level, Marlow reinforces their difference by refusing to meet her in the same discursive territory of "truth." Instead of telling the Intended that Kurtz died muttering "The horror! The horror!"a statement that Marlow interprets as a "supreme moment of complete knowledge" (68) that "had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth" (69)he tells her that Kurtz died muttering her (unspecified) name. As such, Marlow ends his story on a differend by directing her away from knowledge to leave her believing in a false romantic vision of Kurtz's final words. Instead of allowing for the positivity of difference and otherness, Marlow refuses to risk the sort of incommensurability that might flourish if he tried to convey "the horror" to the Intended. Clearly he believes it would be impossible for her to under-

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stand his community of errantry and experience, and he chooses to close off an anticipated differend rather than to allow its free play: in effect, he will guard the difference between male and female forms of knowledge as vigilantly as the two knitting women guard "the door of Darkness." His lie also binds him irrevocably and phantasmatically to Kurtz since it makes him the sole inheritor of Kurtz's story. By choosing to lie to the Intended, Marlow meddles with authorship and authority (he is a storyteller, after all) to impose his own revisions on Kurtz's final statement, thereby effectively authoring Kurtz's story himself. His lie uncannily marks the moment at which he is closest to Kurtz, yet simultaneously this refusal to honor Kurtz's contract for truth instantly dispels their community and their "Being in common." His lie to the Intended which Marlow has already prematurely confessed to his auditors midway through his narration when it slips from his lips as a kind of premature ejaculation of the intention of the whole storyconsequently marks the moment when Marlow has least control over language, narration, or his search for "the truth of things." To mark the closure of his story, then, Marlow refuses the possibility of relation by purposefully remaining fixed in a differend as a means of resisting the frightful contact of knowledge between different modes of thought. In his mind we can hear him insisting that women do not travel, and they "live in a world of their own." His refusal to relate to the Intended is tantamount to claiming a continually shifting epistemological status that no one but himself can discern. By lying to her, and in the split moment that informs his decision to do so, he apparently finds her name (and perhaps the name of "women" in general) translatable and commensurable with the incommensurability of "the horror." Within his own mind he might even believe that he is telling her a kind of truth, leaving her ignorant of the "facts" of what really happened, but affirming to himself the affinity between women and "The horror!"

Notes
I wish to thank Laura Brown, Eduardo Cadava, Jonathan Culler, Ellis Hanson, Molly Hite, Jodie Medd, Natalie Melas, Daniel Schwarz, and Hortense Spillers for offering both encouragement and critique at various stages of writing this paper.

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1. Since its initial publication and early reviews, critics have found Heart of Darkness excessively atmospheric, as well as structurally and adjectivally difficult, shadowy, and undecidable. Ross Murfin offers an excellent overview of some of these early- and mid-century critiques, pointing out that in 1903 John Masefield thought it consisted of "too much cobweb" (98); in 1936 E. M. Forster considered it "a little too fuzzy" (98); and in his highly influential work, The GreatTradition (1963), F. R. Leavis concurred with Forster, also stressing its "overwhelming sinister and fantastic 'atmosphere'" (Leavis 173). 2. Even though it has become something of a critical convention to call this woman "Kurtz's African mistress," she is never explicitly named or designated as such. Heteronormative biases have led critics to assume a sexual relation, but there is no substantial evidence in the text to indicate the precise nature of her relationship with Kurtz. Instead of characterizing her as his "mistress," then, I will simply refer to her as the woman at the Inner Station, or the African woman. 3. Beginning with the opening words of the text"The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest" (7)every vessel that carries Marlow from one land to another is also gendered as feminine. While Conrad's use of feminine names for ships is of course quite conventional for the period, it nevertheless underscores the fact that he leaves every woman of his text unnamed. In pointing this out, we might note, though, that Heart of Darkness also participates in a more general absence of naming: other than Marlow and Kurtz, characters are known by function rather than by proper name. This tendency extends equally across boundaries of race and place. Marlow's audience for his tale consists of the "Director of Companies," the "Lawyer," the "Accountant," and the unnamed frame-narrator; while in Africa he speaks of figures like the "Manager," the "chief accountant," and the "helmsman." Even so, Conrad articulates gender differences through his unnaming since the men tend to be referred to by title or function, while the women are usually referred to by function in terms of their relation to men: Marlow's "aunt," Kurtz's "Intended," Kurtz's "mother," the "laundress" for the chief accountant. Furthermore, geographic place names are rarely specified either: neither the Belgian city nor the Belgian Congo is named; instead we hear only of "a city that always makes me think of a whited sepulchre" (13), and, just once, of "Africa" (11). The Congo itself is never named; when Marlow describes his childhood fascination with its representation on the map, he recalls only that it looked like "an immense snake, uncoiled" (12). When he arrives in Africa after his ocean voyage, he simply remarks that he finally "saw the mouth of the big river" (18). Conrad was

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Difference and Incommensurability in Heart of Darkness well aware of this absence of naming place, at any rate, and in the same letter quoted above to T. Fisher Unwin, he notes that in his manuscript, "The exact locality is not mentioned" (qtd. in Kimbrough 199).

4. Conrad gives an exquisite disquisition on the relation of language to art in his "Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus." Here he argues against the eroding power that "careless usage" can exert upon language, insisting that "it is only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance; it is only through an unremitting, neverdiscouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to plasticity, to color, and that the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage" (xlix). 5. Ian Watt reads Marlow's misogyny as specifically directed to "women of the well-to-do and leisured class to whom his aunt and the Intended, and presumably the womenfolk of his audience, belong." Treating Conrad's text in the context of Victorian ideology,Watt argues that "Marlow's perspective, in fact, assumes the Victorian relegation of leisure-class women to a pedestal of philanthropic idealism high above the economic and sexual facts of life" ("Heart of Darkness and Nineteenth-Century Thought" 114). 6. Conrad invokes the valences of racial passing through his choice of words, which therefore ask us to consider for whom or for what he implies the African woman might have been "passing." Does having an autonomous and authoritative presence as a woman in this text necessarily entail a form of passing? When the African woman "passed" back into the wilderness, is Conrad suggesting that she "passes" back to her "real" identity? 7. Edward Said is generally critical of the "politics and aesthetics" of Heart of Darkness, which "are, so to speak, imperialist" (24); yet he proposes that "[s]ince Conrad dates imperialism, shows its contingency, records its illusions and tremendous violence and waste (as in Nostromo), he permits his later readers to imagine something other than an Africa carved up into dozens of European colonies, even if, for his own part, he had little notion of what that Africa might be" (26). 8. In "Lying as Dying in Heart of Darkness," Garrett Stewart takes this point even further to argue that "both" women of the text (in this case the Intended and Kurtz's "mistress") "copresent in the narrator's mind's eye, are emanations of Marlow as well as of Kurtz" (328), and he proposes that the Intended's "black-draped mourning is Kurtz's darkness visible" (331). It would be going too far to pursue this line of thought further and

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propose that the women are never more than Marlow's symbolic projections, but Stewart is right to point out the consistent manner in which women function as a kind of tabula rasa on which Marlow's preoccupations are staged.As we will see, the women also take on qualities from the settings that surround them. 9. In her recent study, Conrad and Women, Susan Jones points to a fascinating letter George Gissing wrote to Joseph Conrad in 1903 in which Gissing claims there is a pressure of speech behind the actual silence of Conrad's women: "Wonderful, I say, your mute or all but mute women. How, in Satan's name, do you make their souls speak through their silence?" (qtd. in Jones 21). His point is idealistic and misogynistic at the same time, though he does touch upon some of the work these silent, or nearly silent, women do in Conrads text. 10. As Robert Kimbrough reminds us, it was a common feature of the nineteenth-century colonial imagination to conceive of unexplored territories as "blank" or "white" empty spaces. Kimbrough writes that Sir Richard Francis Burton, for example, went in 1856 "to search for the sources of the Nile and to map what [he] called the 'huge white blot' of Central Africa" (146). 11. In a further link between women and discursive patterns in Heart of Darkness, we should note that both Hermes and the three Fates created the alphabet, although they invented only the first five vowels and two consonants (Graves 65, 182). That is, the Fates are partially responsible for the signs that make written language possible. 12. Earlier in the story, when Marlow is first describing the trip toward the Inner Station on the river steamer, he associates himself with someone who is "blindfolded." Defending his navigational skills he claims he "didn't do badly either since I managed not to sink that steamboat on my first trip. It's a wonder to me yet. Imagine a blindfolded man set to drive a van over a bad road. I sweated and shivered over that business considerably" (36). When he later invokes the image of the "blindfolded" woman he again offers the possibility to his readers that he and the women of his story are more intertwinedeven metaphoricallythan he would like to admit. 13. See Natalie Melas's "Brides of Opportunity: Figurations of Women and Colonial Territory in Lord Jim" for a brilliant discussion of the ways in which Conrad's Manicheistic dualisms echo structures of colonialism. 14. Henry Staten reads this encounter as a sado-masochistic power conflict between Marlow and the Intended where Marlow possesses a "desire to inflict mourning on a woman and then to drink of her grief" (163).

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