1 Introduction

In creating our mental world, we are constantly required to build up a representation of the perceived events so as to be able to construct an interpretation or simply to make sense of our lived experience. There are basically two approaches to realize this fundamental task; both are as old as human civilization and as intuitively natural as our speech. The first might be called the platonic approach. When we are confronted with evidence of the world that presents itself to our senses, we will necessarily find that it is exasperatingly multifarious and exceedingly rich in changing details. How then to keep record of this abundance of facts and to create a form of knowledge about them? One way is to suppose that there is a constancy behind or underlying the shifting phenomena. As Plato indicates,

We distinguish between the many particular things which we call beautiful or good, and absolute beauty and goodness. Similarly with all other collections of things, we say there is corresponding to each set s single, unique Form which we call an “absolute” reality…And we say that the particular are objects of sight but not of intelligence, while the Forms are the objects of intelligence but not of sight.Footnote 1

Through this distinction between the visible and the intelligible, we are in a position to conceptually handle the teeming world of the sensible. By a process of abstraction and categorization, phenomena could be grouped together and then considered as manifestations of one entity. In this way, human mind would have a manageable number of mental objects to deal with and thus the possibility of establishing a rational order in our understanding of the world. The platonic approach has been generally preferred by philosophers and social scientists in their study. In a more general way, we often find it applied uncritically to all kinds of meaning analysis. However, this is not the only possible way to achieve a reliable cognition of the world. We may also choose to take the other approach and remain closely engaged with the contingent and the occurring. History, for Homer, is in no way determined by some grand ideas but follows its course full of accidents. Achilles’ rage and Ulysses’ ruses are just what happened in a given time and in a given place and those incidents should be taken as what they are: the display of human foibles and strengths under circumstances beyond their control. It is these haphazard events that bring human story forward. For Homer, every event is a unique episode and every player in the drama is a singular personality. They could not be brought to fit in predetermined categories and yet still deserve to be accounted for in their full measure. The literary vision, as is to be found in Homer’s epics, or for that matter, in all the great literary works in the world, has its value just in this immediacy with the somewhat confused and unpredictable reality. The Homeric approach leads to a form of truth that we cannot hope to obtain through other means and upon which a crucial cognition of the human world can be eloquently elaborated.

Yet, too often, this literary vision has been misunderstood or simply downplayed. Even within literary circles there has been an inclination toward abstract generalizations, deserting the realm of the particular and the individual. It is to be noted that literary criticism, since quite a long time, has been shaped by a search for theoretical rigor and conceptual justification. This tendency is particularly intensified in the post-colonialist critique. Literary portraits and storylines are subject to a scrutiny for their categorical identity. Consequently critical evaluations stand, not according to the truthfulness of the description, but on the tag of a social, ethnical, cultural, religious, or national category. The controversy over Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is just a case in point. We would, in what follows, try to demonstrate that the condemnation leveled against this novella is initiated in a dubious exploitation of a literary text taken as a social discourse. It is also our intension to argue that as a work of art, this novella should be appreciated, not with respect to some ideological categories, but in its unique engagement with life.

2 Categories in Literary Criticism

Literary criticism has by now developed into a flourishing enterprise, and it is sometimes suggested that sophisticated critical studies nowadays are themselves literary works. This self-congratulatory appreciation conceals a troubling fact that would explain the rise of some confusions in contemporary critical debates. We may not forget that literature and its criticism are based on very different, if not contradictory, principles. A literary critic and a novelist or poet set about their creative work in drastically different ways. Writers are, following Homeric approach, supposed to be attentive to individual beings and their life experiences in time and in space, to instances that are memorable, while critics are motivated by an urge to draw out hidden patterns and general models and express them in terms of principles and categories. However, these two approaches tend to intertwine and end up in a paradox that literary creation itself would appear as a response to certain critical distinctions.

To a certain extent, all literary texts seem to lend themselves in one way or another to a categorical interpretation. Homer presents his heroes with characteristic epithets: ‘Ajax the great,’ ‘godlike Hector,’ ‘the swift Talthybius,’ apparently making them embodiments of a general quality. For Homer, this manner of naming is just a customary narrative technique of a popular genre, yet one can take it as the initial diverting point in literary creation. A poet could aim to be as truthful as possible to nature, i.e., to the visible world as is perceived; or otherwise, he could strive to propose an image of a higher and idealized model. In his essay of 1795, Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung Schiller gave us a theoretical characterization of these two different types of poetic esthetics. According to Schiller, poets of what he calls the naïve school present nature as they see it in an instinctive way, while poets of what he calls the sentimental school make efforts to develop what is conceived as epitomes of beauty or truth. At this point, it is helpful to read this remark of Schiller’s in connection with what Plato says about the difference between the seen and the known quoted above. In a later development, Nietzsche takes cue from Schiller in his study of the classic Greek art and acclaims,

But how seldom is that naïve state, that complete embrace by the beauty of appearance achieved! How inexpressibly sublime Homer is, therefore, who as a single individual relates to that Apollonian folk culture as the single dream artist does to the dream-capacity of the people and of the nature itself.Footnote 2

How could then, in Nietzsche’s words, ‘Homer stand(s) before us, the naïve artist’Footnote 3? Nietzsche believes that its secret lies in ‘principium individuationis,’ because he finds in Homer

This apotheosis of individuation, if we think of it as at all imperative and prescriptive, knows only one law, the individual, that is, respect for the limits of the individual, moderation in the Hellenic sense.Footnote 4

What is more, the Homeric approach with its focus on the individual and the particular is not just one of the options for any aspiring artist; it appears also to be the obligatary pathway to the revelation of the platonic beauty. In Phaedrus, Socrates explains,

(B)ut on the subject of beauty—as we said, it shone out when in company with those other things, and now that we have come to earth we have found it gleaming most clearly through the clearest of the senses that we have. For of all the sensations coming to us through the body, sight is the keenest: wisdom we do not see with it—the feelings of love it would cause in us would be terrible, if it allowed some such clear image of itself to reach our sight, and so too with the other objects of love, but as it is, beauty alone has acquired this privilege, of being most evident and most loved.Footnote 5

In other words, the beauty as an idea can and must be seized in its upmost vividness and clearness through the senses, through the perception of the individual beautiful things as Homer so remarkably realizes. Beauty in itself is accessible only through the sensible beauty and the naivete as is demonstrated in Homeric verses is indispensable for artistic success. That’s why Schiller preaches a reconciliation of the modern poets with the ancients so as to renew the fundamental esthetical principle.

The classical discussion over the two approaches that we briefly traced here remains largely relevant today. Besides an apparent metamorphosis of terminology, the basic question still concerns us. To what extent and with what justification a literary work is to be subjected to a categorical analysis? Of cause, new historical circumstances have shaped the contemporary discussions and informed the themes of today’s controversy in an unprecedented way. In our ideology-driven time, there has also been a shift of focus. Generally speaking, Critics in modern times pay less attention to the way poets or novelists treat materials taken from life or to the rapports they maintain with the perceived world. Modern literary theorists are more interested in examining what they find in literary works as objects that are taken as having an ontological existence of their own and then considered susceptible of any kind of social, psychological, political, philosophical and historical judgments. They descend from the Olympian heights and take side in the ranged battles of human society. Consequently, ideological concepts and sociological categories are fed into critical apparatus as analytical criteria for the interpretation of literary works. In a letter dated in 1888, F. Engels put forward a formula that remained a gold standard for generations of Marxist critics since its publication in 1953 in Moscow: ‘the truthful representation of typical characters under typical circumstances.’Footnote 6 What is a typical character but a constructed image that represents in the best possible way a category? Following the trends of social, political and philosophical thinking of the time, literary critics and theorists of various tendencies tend to read literary images as representatives of some social classes, psychological types or ethnic groups and to make their evaluations accordingly. In a sense, categorical thinking prevails in modern literary criticism.

3 Through the Mirror of Identities

For the past half a century, urgent concerns about the malaise of our society have led to adoption of new conceptual tools for a different reading of classic literary works. If we ask what is the defining feature of the contemporary intellectual world, the answer would most likely to be an emergence of the otherness in almost all fields: The long reigning euro-centralism has fallen to disrepute, and previously marginal identities, be it the feminine, the colored, the minority, the colonized, the oppressed in general, are brought to a place of honor. This sweeping movement requires of cause a shift of viewpoints through a change of positions. However, writers and critics have two opposing ways to handle the question of identity. On the literary side, we can see that the crossing of identity boundaries, often claimed as revolutionary by proponents of post-colonialism, post-modernism, feminism and other kindred-isms, is in fact not so novel an endeavor. Montesquieu, with his characteristically penetrating wit, made his countrymen exclaim: ‘Oh! Oh! Monsieur is Persian? That’s most extraordinary! How can someone be Persian?’ (‘Ah! ah! Monsieur est Persan? C’est une chose bien extraordinaire! comment peut-on être Persan?).Footnote 7 Despite its apparent joking tone, this famous question imagined by Montesquieu not only anticipates by more than two centuries all the soul-searching culture critiques of our times but also surpasses them in its richness and the fluidity of perception that only the best literature could provide. When we look into the context in which this existential question about the otherness is raised, we would find an extraordinary movement of viewpoints: it is the Persian guest, Rica, who reports the reaction of the Frenchmen but the question is effectively penned by Montesquieu, a Frenchman who, as a native of Bordeaux, illustrates in these Persian letters the mental state of Parisians. From whose point of view is this question in fact framed? We might say that it is from any and every point of view involved in an instantaneous cognitive movement and the poignancy of Montesquieu’ imagined doubt is just derived from this shift of perceptions. Beneath its deceptively simple or naive form, this question points to a profound uncertainty as to man’s position in the world. How to construct in an accessible way the identity of the other? We don’t have to wait for the advent of post-modernism to hear this interrogation which was formulated by the eminent philosopher of the Enlightenment. It is not an accident that the first questioning of the otherness is raised in a literary text. In fact, we can see that since Montesquieu up to our time the bewilderment over cultural and social identities has been resonating typically in literary texts and then taken up by contemporary literary criticism in an upsettingly rigid manner. Typically, the modern literary critics have their way to address the question of identity.

We will here take Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness as an instance of how identity perceptions would impact on the reception of a literary text by critics. This novella had earlier on secured its status in the canon of world literature but a blunt attack against it in the 1970s of the last century has thrown it into the limelight of a wide controversy. In 1975, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe delivered a lecture at the State University of Massachusetts entitled ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.’ It was not a well-argued piece of literary criticism, and the whole lecture turned around one harsh condemnation ‘Conrad is a bloody racist’ which was in later reprints changed to ‘a thoroughgoing racist.’Footnote 8 In a later revised version of his essay contained in the third Norton Critical Edition of Heart of Darkness, Achebe adjusted his shot, adding in a much milder tone that ‘Conrad saw and condemned the evil of imperial exploitation but was strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its iron teeth.’ Since then, the racist accusation continued to resound in the literary circle. Around the same period of time other literary critics with more solid credentials as theorists, Terry Eagleton and Edward Said foremost among them, also called Conrad’s moral and ideological integrity into question. We would like here to examine this celebrated novella in the light of these severe criticisms.

The novella Heart of Darkness was the result of a literary invitation. The literary editor William Blackwood was preparing the thousandth issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and asked Conrad to contribute. After some hesitation, Conrad decided upon the subject and began writing the story in mid-December 1898. It was published in three installments in the spring of 1899 in the magazine and then again in book form in 1902. As we know, much in the narrative could be traced to Conrad’s personal experiences as a seaman. The beginning scene of the story has an autobiographical antecedent, since Conrad once did take a cruise with his friends on a yacht named Nellie on the Themes. In 1890, Conrad was recruited by the Société pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo as second in command of a river steamer, and in this capacity and also for a short time as acting captain, he made several voyages along the Conga river. In a way he was an eye witness of desolate scenes in the vast land which was then called the Congo Free State.

In many aspects, Heart of Darkness broke the normal mold of narration when it was written and published in the last years of the nineteenth century. As if to preempt eventual misinterpretation of his work, at the beginning of the story Conrad warns his reader of an epistemological danger inherent in the story. ‘The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical…., and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.’Footnote 9 It could be seen that the haziness of the meaning that Conrad set out to paint grows out of an overlapping of viewpoints. The central figure of the novella, Kurtz, does not come into focus until quite late in the story and the reader is led to approach through a number of different visions by the eyes of various people. First of all the anonymous listener on board the ship Nellie whom one could readily identify with the reader but not completely; then, Marlow of cause, the eyewitness of the whole tragedy who bears many resemblances to Conrad himself but again not in an identical way; then, a number of persons, the accountant in the station, the manager of the company, etc., who continue to speak about Kurtz in an tantalizing and haunting way. Each mention adds to the figure of Kurtz, not so much some insight but rather a new layer of biased color. At the end of the perilous journey, we finally get a glimpse of the man through the eye of Marlow but the revelation is not any clearer for that. Till his last gasp with that piercing and ambivalent cry ‘the horror! the horror!’, the figure of Kurtz has never been clearly delineated. A certain haziness reigns throughout the story. It is no doubt the deliberate effect that Conrad’s ingenious narrative technique creates yet we are also made aware that it is impossible to bring down this Kurtz within the limits of a contour or to put him in a category. In fact, this man has been too transgressive to be presented in any determined manner. He is neither European nor African, neither god nor devil, neither moral nor cynic, neither a symbol nor a fleshed-out person. His depiction defies literary norms yet he remains one of the most unforgettable figure world literature has ever produced. Even the story as a whole defies the traditional genre distinction. As Cedric Watts finds it, the story seems to be ‘a mixture of oblique autobiography, traveler’s yarn, adventure story, psychological odyssey, political satire, symbolic prose–poem, black comedy, spiritual melodrama, and skeptical meditation.’Footnote 10

How to make of Kurtz and his story? This constitutes in fact a huge challenge to modern critics. Conrad has been often labeled as a precursor of modernism in literature and Heart of Darkness is often described as a work ahead of its time. However, the controversy around Conrad and this novella of his reveals paradoxically a deep incompatibility between Conrad’s writings and the approaches of contemporary critics who have borrowed their analytical tools from the conceptual arsenal of modernist and post-modernist schools. Most characteristically, they reason by categories. Achebe, for example, read Heart of Darkness as essentially a story about racial opposition between white people and black people. To support his claim that Conrad was a racist, he picked up some passages in the novella, where the Black characters did not appear in a bright light: The agonizing black laborers kept in the grove ‘they were all dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now—nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation,’ and then the starved black crew on board the steamer asking for the body of a dead man with these thrilling words ‘catch ‘im, eat ‘im.’ True enough, all the Black figures in the novella were described in their most abject state, tramped down, starved, neglected, ill-treated, and killed without a second thought. An indignant Achebe denounces these images as profoundly unfair and, in the name of racial equality, he demanded a more dignified and even glorified presentation of Africa and its people. In the second half of his lecture, one may feel his wish for a black hero in this story without hero, black or white, since he would prefer the Western reading public to see Africa as ‘a continent of people—not angels, but not rudimentary souls either—just people, often highly gifted people and strikingly successful in their enterprise with life and society.’Footnote 11 But, with regard to the unspeakable sufferings of the colonized people and the undeniable atrocities committed by the Western colonial powers, which way would do more justice to history: the graphic vividness of Conrad’s account in his novella about the dark misery of a defenseless people or an imagined reverse of the deplorable power relations, in a way of the recent American film Black Panther where an African country is described as possessing the most advanced technology capable of dominating the world. This fantasy film might comfort some wounded ethnic pride but would it really alleviate the pains inflicted on a whole continent? Achebe’s reading of Conrad’s story was fundamentally framed in his vision of the world split between the White and the Black and that is why he interpreted the darkness in the story as another name of the blackness, which is evidently not what Conrad’s story implies.

Other critics have brought other ideological criteria to bear upon Heart of Darkness. One of earlier examples was Terry Eagleton’s analysis presented in his Criticism and Ideology. In a basically Marxist interpretation of literature, Eagleton looks into a literary text for its ideological underpinnings, as he says: ‘Within the text itself, then, ideology becomes a dominant structure, determining the character and disposition of certain “pseudo-real” constituents.’Footnote 12 What then is the dominant ideology of Conrad’s literary text? Or in another of Eagleton’s cherished terms, what is Conrad’s Literary Mode of Production connected with the General Mode of Production of the time? The General Mode of Production in Conrad’s lifetime was, as Lenin told us, imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, and inevitably Eagleton saw Conrad’s story essentially through the prism of imperialism. ‘Th(e) ideological conjuncture in Conrad’s texts is determined in the last instance by the imperialist character of the English capitalism he served.’Footnote 13 Unlike Achebe, Eagleton, in a more subtle analysis, did perceive in the work of Conrad a huge ambiguity, since, as he points out, ‘Conrad neither believes in the cultural superiority of the colonials, nor rejects imperialism outright.’Footnote 14 However, the general framework of ideological vision remains unshakable and even the aesthetic features of Conrad’s literal form are seen as premised on this imperialist ideology.

Equally condemning is Edward Said’s interpretation of Conrad’s novella. In his Culture and Imperialism, a sequel to his highly influential Orientalism, Conrad’s works and particularly Heart of Darkness are seen as an expression of a shameless Western view of the world, of the inescapable domination of the West over the East. For Said, ‘All Conrad can see is a world totally dominated by the Atlantic West, in which every opposition to the West only confirms the West’s wicked power.’Footnote 15 In a hardly academic manner, he even put words into Conrad’s mouth, ‘Conrad seems to be saying, “We Westerners will decide who is a good native or a bad, because all natives have sufficient existence by virtue of our recognition. We created them, we taught them to speak and think, and when they rebel, they simply confirm our views of them as silly children, duped by some of their Western masters”.’Footnote 16 Having imaged these spurious thoughts for Conrad, Said proceeds to suggest that ‘recent attitudes in Washington and among most Western policymakers and intellectuals show little advance over his views.’Footnote 17 We might wonder how literary criticism could take on the form of a commentary on contemporary international politics, and one may be deeply puzzled by the extremely harsh and antagonistic tone of Said’s accusation against Conrad. Said himself provides his answer to the reader. He says that his intention is to write a book about ‘us’ and ‘them,’ in other words, a book of dichotomy, a dichotomy of West vs. East, White vs. non-White, Colonizer vs. Colonized, etc. This vision of uncompromising categorical duality could hardly do justice to the essential characteristics of Conrad’s writing alluded above.

This type of vision is in fact prevailing in much of the recent criticisms about Conrad and his novella Heart of Darkness( see, among others, Norman 1997; Moore et al. 2004; Goonetillek 2007). In the three symptomatic critiques respectively by Achebe, Eagleton and Said that we quoted here, their arguments are invariably developed along a dual opposition. For Achebe, it is the antagonism between white people and black people; for Eagleton, his perception is basically that of class attachment; for Said, the tragic confrontation between the colonizing West and the colonized East. This kind of categorical analysis in dual opposition tend to give their criticism an aura of alluring clarity of argumentation and characteristically also confers an almost irresistible moral strength to their conclusions. What makes their argument seem to be more ineluctable is the fact that their positions have been rooted in these authors’ personal experiences. As Achebe stated clearly in his lecture, his aversion to Conrad and the novella was triggered by some humiliating encounters he had as an African in the USA. As for Said, an exiled Palestinian intellectual, the moral indignation he so keenly felt about the sufferings of his own people, victim of the Western colonialism, motivated all his academic writings. The Marxist Eagleton developed his theoretical framework in a society deeply marked by class distinction and class-consciousness. The concepts and the judgments they adopted and developed in analyzing Conrad’s story came so naturally to them that even when they tried to put some subtlety in their analysis, for example, to state that Conrad is both imperialist and anti-imperialist,Footnote 18 or to suggest that Conrad’ viewpoint disturbs imperialist assumptions to the precise degree that it reinforces them,Footnote 19 their argumentation has never been able to break away from a simple dual track. One may then raise the question: Is it the right or legitimate way to read literature in such a dual vision? Do we, in practicing this kind of literary criticism, just miss the point of what literature is all about? In another and more general sense, we may also ask whether it is possible for one to transcend the deterministic mindset of one’s ethnic origin or social environment and perceive the world in any way other than the one imposed by the accident of our birth or the one in which we feel most comfortable? If there is such a possibility, it is most readily to be found on the side of literature since here comes in the unique effectiveness of literature. What is literature if it is not the wondrous window that allows us a glimpse of another life, another vision, another understanding, another mode of cognition?

4 Literature as Art

Of cause, Conrad was not able to defend himself against the racist or imperialist accusation inflicted on his works by those critics of the later twentieth century but with his characteristic perspicacity he foresaw what his works would possibly endure. He says, ‘(books) share with us the great incertitude of ignominy or glory—of severe justice and senseless persecution—of calumny and misunderstanding—the shame of undeserved success.’Footnote 20 One reason for the calumny and misunderstanding that his works suffered in our time, it seems to us, could be traced to a deviated view on literature.

Andre Gide, an early admirer of Conrad, describes Conrad’s literary work in these terms: ‘no one has lived a more wild life than Conrad did, no one has transmuted life into art in a more patient, more conscientious and more skillful way than Conrad did (Nul n’avait plus sauvagement vécu, que Conrad; nul ensuite, n’avait soumis la vie à une aussi patiente, consciente et savante transmutation d’art).’Footnote 21 For Gide, Conrad’s literary works are essentially works of art, with all the prerogatives a work of art must be granted and he appreciated Conrad’s stories on their intrinsic literary values. As Gide’s remark indicates, Conrad acquired his literary fame in his time mainly on the strength of his literary achievements, since the reading public as well as writers themselves knew very well that a literary work should not be judged by any criteria other than the quality of its literariness. Conrad himself made it very clear when he affirms, ‘(m)y task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all to make you see.’Footnote 22 That means we should not judge his literary creations on an ideational mold. One would think that modern literary critics, having read Flaubert, Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Hölderlin and Thomas Man, would recognize the ontological autonomy of literature as an art on itself and by itself. One would presume that the battle has been at long last won to evaluate literary and artistic creation above and beyond its utilitarian function as a vehicle of ideas. Homeric approach to reality should have gained its rightful recognition as an irreplaceable way of coming to terms with the complexity of the world. Yet, since a certain time, there has been a visible reaction and literature is once again taken as a discourse like any other one to be analyzed through the same conceptual tools forged in ideological fire. Of cause, racism, imperialism and colonialism are all central concerns of modern times in our troubled world, but a true literary work, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in particular, should not be read as a political statement with strict consideration for each and every character’s class and racial status in the story. However, Said in his analysis of Heart of Darkness tried exactly to do this. He even noted what is the social class the listeners of Marlow’s story belong to. What he ended up in producing is not a literary criticism but a political indictment. And he regrets that ‘As a creature of his time, Conrad could not grant the natives their freedom.’Footnote 23 Of cause, Conrad could not, since he was not a politician or guerrilla leader but an artist as Gide defines him.

One might of cause object that literature is not a pure esthetic object and it has its full cognitive function for the reading public. That is true. However, the study of a society one can find in a literary work is by definition fundamentally different from the study in, for example, a sociological treaty. As far as true literary cognition is concerned, the answer to Montesquieu’s question ‘how can someone be Persian?’ is certainly a ‘no!’ because one cannot be Persian, one can only be Rica, Usbek or Ibben with their particular temperaments, experiences and individual histories. What we should look for in literature is not an understanding of imperialism as a category, the black people as an ethnic identity or the colonialism as a dark page in human history. We read literature to see how a particular person acts, thinks, feels and reacts in particular conditions. If Heart of Darkness still attracts readers all over the world despite the racist and colonialist condemnations, it is because, I think, as a piece of authentic literature, it reveals in a masterful way some obscure aspects of human nature in extreme circumstances. The account of that nightmarish voyage through the primeval forests and down the Congo river could have an allegorical, mythical, historical or political reading but the range of differing interpretations is rendered possible only by the fact that it is the account of a unique event in time and space experienced by particular persons in a particular moment of their individual life. The point of literature is just the richness and the specifically recognizable uniqueness of certain human conditions and any conceptual reduction to categorical oppositions could only be a deplorable misrepresentation or a betrayal of true literary value.

Literature helps us to see the world, but unlike ideological abstractions it provides a vision that cuts across categories and brings our mind into contact with life itself in its most poignant immediacy. Conrad ends the story of Heart of Darkness by describing the visit of Mallow to the bereft lady. The lady in mourning insisted on knowing the last words of Kurtz and Mallow couldn’t find in himself the courage to pronounce the real words uttered by the dying Kurtz. What Mallow told the lady was a lie; however, it reveals something profound and truthful in another sense. For ordinary readers, the last scene of the story appears quite striking. It is in the calm interior of an old English house with a gentle lady who might have never left her country and this constitutes an unexpected shift of setting for a story full of wild jungles, gruesome sufferings, savage greed, horrendous dangers and unspeakable rituals. Just like the knocks at the door after the murder scene in Macbeth, the regular life of simple people is brought back by this scene when Mallow finds himself in the presence of the lady. With a subtle categorical transgression, a familiar sensitivity is suddenly become accessible to the reader. What this shift achieves is not so much a startling contrast rendering the jungle adventure all the more horrible. This scene in fact brings the darkness right to the door of our living room. When Mallow invented the last words of Kurtz, the trader’s horror is thrown into the moral light of what could be termed a normal world and when Mallow parted with the lady in the encroaching night, the reader is made to keenly feel the fragile resistance of a normal life against the menacing darkness of the wild. The reader would most likely finish reading the novella with some long-held certainties shaken and some conventional convictions unsettled. We would see the world and our place in it differently, but the difference does not basically concern an ideological realignment, since the vision Conrad’s novella allows us to see is of a much broader kind: rich, fluid and underdetermined as life itself. It is not unlike the river image that begins and closes the story: ‘the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky.’ This overcast sky would not be cleared by throwing at it these righteous but sterile labels like racism, colonialism or imperialism. The blocks of identity with their intransigent barriers would certainly impede the flow of the river. On this point, it is appropriate to end our discussion by quoting Conrad once again when he tries to define the work of an artist. He says,

The artist, then, like the thinker or the scientist, seeks the truth and makes his appeal. Impressed by the aspect of the world the thinker plunges into ideas, the scientist into facts…It is otherwise with the artist. Confronted by the same enigmatical spectacle the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife,… The changing wisdom of successive generations discards ideas, questions facts, demolishes theories. But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation—to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity.’Footnote 24

Conrad has made a good point here and his appreciation of what literature can and should bring to the reader corresponds well to our most intimate experience of reading good novels and poems. The controversy around Heart of Darkness is in fact not simply about one particular literary work; as a matter of fact the debate concerns the appropriate way to understand literature.

5 Conclusion

In what precedes we have tried to define the literary approach as opposed to the conceptual or categorical approach in forming our understanding of the world. We have argued that a confusion or a non-distinction of these two basic ways of representation has led to unwarranted criticism of literary works, racist and post-colonialist condemnation against the novella Heart of Darkness being just a most striking case in recent history. There is then urgency to reaffirm the raison d’être of literary work.

It is to be noticed that in the long tradition of reflections about arts and literature, from Plato/Socrates, Nietzsche to Conrad as we cited in this paper, visual images have been given the most prominent place. According to these classical authors, art, including literary art, is about depicting the world as we see it. Conrad makes this point very clear, ‘And art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible world.’Footnote 25 However, if we examine the idea more closely, more questions would be raised as to its real implication. How could justice be done to the visible world when written words are the main medium? The whole project is not without its own problems, for it is plainly evident that a faithful rendering of the sensory data in a pure phenomenological manner would not produce good literature. The artist could not and in fact does not record naively what he or she sees. Writers as artists have to work on what they have perceived and apply their creative talents to the material to re-imagine a visible world of their own in the hope of revealing a deeper truth about the world within and without. This is, we believe, what Conrad really meant by ‘the highest kind of justice.’ The framing of the visible world by verbal means necessarily calls in creative intervention and the interaction between the sensible and the intelligible becomes inevitable and crucial. On the reception side, the reader ‘sees’ what the writer intends him to see and then is able to understand. Along the process, concepts and categories, as part of the reader’s intellectual paraphernalia, often get involved so that one is likely to propose a conceptualization of literary works and even to take literary characters, not as individuals, but as embodiments of a type or tokens of a category. It is easy, even natural, for the ideological criticism rampant in our times to find a pathway into the interpretation of literary works, as we have seen in the case of this novella in question.

But, to do justice to literature, we should keep in mind the essential distinction between, say, a novel and a treaty of moral science. What, then, is the defining feature of literature? When Conrad indicates that meaning in a story is ‘not inside like a kernel but outside, …in the likeness of one of these misty halos,’ his simile provides us with a key to the question. Unlike a rational argumentation, writings that deserves the name ‘literature’ excels in the indeterminacy of significance which defies any effort to nail them down and fix them within the boundaries of concepts and categories. Bloom famously complains, ‘Conrad’s diction is notoriously vague throughout Heart of Darkness.’ (Bloom 2008, p.2) He is of cause talking about the language style, yet this ‘vagueness’ (or in other words the fluidity of meaning) is also to be found in the overall structure of the story. For more than half a century, all kinds of interpretations have been successively or even simultaneously read into this novella of Conrad’s, and they are all able to build upon elements in the story to justify their argument. Characteristically, the novella seems to have the capacity to allow for constructions of new meanings. Achebe made a racism reading of it, Eagleton made a class-struggle reading of it, and Said made a post-colonialism reading of it. Justified or not, these critiques have all been based on the rich scenes of the story. We can well imagine that following ineluctable metamorphosis of social life, concerns and problematics so impassioned today may lose their topicality and fade into history. No one will then take any interest, except a historiographic one, in these interpretations of today. Yet, the story will still have its full impact on the consciousness of later generations who would most likely try to extract new meanings out of this halo. That is the way great literature works with us. It refuses to be imprisoned by categorical reasoning and continues to make us see these fascinating individuals and their life stories.