SOURCE: Rabinowitz, Peter J. “Reader Response, Reader Responsibility: Heart of Darkness and the Politics of Displacement.” In Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism: Joseph Conrad, ‘Heart of Darkness,’ edited by Ross C. Murfin, pp. 131-47. Boston Mass.: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Rabinowitz presents a reader-response interpretation of Conrad's Heart of Darkness.]

Even before Chinua Achebe proclaimed in 1975 that “Joseph Conrad was a bloody racist” (9),¹ many critics had scrutinized the racial politics of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. But Achebe's stature as one of Africa's foremost novelists gave new urgency to the concerns about Conrad's ideology; and since then, it has been increasingly difficult to talk about the novel without coming to terms, either explicitly or implicitly, with Achebe's condemnation. Some critics have defended Conrad's political credentials. Brian W. Shaffer, for example, argues that Conrad's African fictions are “‘rejoinders’” to philosopher Herbert Spencer's “typology of civilization” (46), which made a hierarchical distinction between militant societies (“simple, repressive,” and evolutionarily backward) and industrial societies (“complex, democratic,” and more advanced) (47). Thus, although Conrad organizes his novel around Spencer's categories, he doesn't defend the norms of imperialism; rather, according to Shaffer, he “invokes, only to destroy, such norms, values, and myths” (55). Other critics, in contrast, have sifted through Conrad's text for further traces of his racism. Susan Blake, for instance, accepts Achebe's accusation and adds further charges of her own. Still others have staked out a more ambiguous ground. Patrick Brantlinger, among the most sophisticated, argues in an essay reprinted in this volume that Heart of Darkness “offers a powerful critique of at least some manifestations of imperialism and racism, as it simultaneously presents that critique in ways that can be characterized only as imperialist and racist. … The novel itself … cancels out its own best intentions” (279, 295).

The inquiry into Conrad's participation in the racism and imperialism of the nineteenth century is both important and illuminating. But it is also safe, since it directs the most severe indictments against someone who is conveniently dead. In this essay, then, I will propose a related question, one that is more dangerous because it touches more directly on our immediate lives. In what ways might we, Conrad's modern readers, be implicated in politically questionable activities as we interpret the text? In other words, I want to think less about what Conrad did when he wrote than about what we do when we read—I want to turn away from the qualities of the text (for instance, the “point of view itself” that Blake sees as “the real basis of what emerges as racism in literature” [400]) and focus instead on the actions of the reader. My concern here will thus be less with the politics of literature (that is, the politics encoded within particular texts that are already written and for which we as readers have no direct accountability) than with the politics of interpretation (that is, the politics embedded in our own practices and for which we are in fact responsible).

My argument stems from my interest in the strategies that readers employ as they try to make sense out of works of art.² In general, I refer to all such procedures as acts of interpretation—using a broad definition of “interpretation” as any act that facilitates our experience or our understanding of a work of art by providing a grid within which to receive it, a framework that guides (and hence limits) our responses. It is easy, of course, to recognize the interpretive component in acts of explication that overtly distill a “meaning” from a text. For instance, when Ian Watt claims that “Conrad's writing and his mind in general aim to advance, not political programs, but moral understanding” (12), or when Robert F. Bergstrom sees the book as “the profound and resigned look into the face of human evil” (747), there is little doubt that interpretation is taking place. But it is no less an interpretive act when a reader engages with the characters, making judgments about the choices they make or the conditions under which they live—for instance, when a reader sympathizes with the sufferings of the “black shadows of disease and starvation,” the enslaved workers who, “lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food,” had sickened and crawled off to die in “the greenish gloom” of the “Inferno” of the ravine:

Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees, leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair.

(p. 31)

Critical acts that aim at characterizing a text in more “objective” and “neutral” terms are interpretive as well, for in “describing” the work or placing it in a particular context, they too tell us how to take it, how to organize our perceptions and judgments of it. For instance, when Garrett Stewart describes the plot of Heart of Darkness as the story of “a level-headed seaman named Marlow [who] journeys to the Congo as steamer captain for a European trading company” (319), he may appear at first to be simply reporting what is indisputably there on the surface. But to call Marlow “level-headed” is already to take a position, to propose a way of thinking about the text. More significant (because it is more hidden), even referring to the unnamed river as “the Congo” is an interpretive act. For by placing the novel in a specific cultural context, Stewart suggests a particular vantage point from which to consider it, and hence encourages readers to ascribe a particular meaning to it.

Indeed, the interpretive significance of placing something in context is explicitly discussed at several points in the novel. Marlow points out, for instance, that the “tremor of far-off drums” he hears during his two-hundred-mile tramp to the Central Station might well sound “weird, appealing, suggestive, and wild” to European ears; but he recognizes that it might perhaps have a meaning “as profound … as the sound of bells in a Christian country” to someone who listens in the context of the African culture that produces the sound (p. 35). Similarly, the scribbling in the margins of the copy of An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship that he finds in the hut below the Inner Station appears at first to be in cipher and hence an “extravagant mystery” (p. 54). But it suddenly changes meaning when the context changes, when he discovers that it is written not in a private code, but in Russian.

Even metacritical acts are usually profoundly interpretive. When, for instance, Bernhard Reitz discusses the various interpretations of “the symbolically depicted moral conflict” (41), he may at first be appearing to discuss the interpretive practice of others without making any interpretive commitment of his own. But he makes an interpretive move as soon as he asserts that the conflict is, in fact, “symbolic”—for this, too, provides a framework within which to make sense of the text.

Interpretive processes can be highly idiosyncratic, and as a consequence many reader critics have focused on the differences between readers. Indeed, David Bleich has argued that “the role of personality in response is the most fundamental fact of criticism” (4). Still, it is no less revealing to study the ways in which interpretations overlap than to study the ways in which they diverge.³ After all, given the complexity of a literary text, especially one as intricate as Heart of Darkness, we would normally expect different people to read differently. It's the degree to which people read in similar ways that's surprising, and therefore arguably in even greater need of explanation.

Thus, for the purposes of this argument, I am not going to be concerned with the interpretive consequences of a reader's individuality (for instance, the consequences of the individual “identity theme” that Norman Holland, in 5 Readers Reading, sees as providing the basic framework to which the reader “assimilates” a text [128; emphasis in original]). Rather, I am going to explore interpretation as the application of interpretive procedures that are conventional, in the specific sense that they are cultural products that are both taught and more-or-less communally agreed upon.

To be sure, conventions operate with different degrees of stringency, and in this regard interpretive conventions are less like traffic laws than like rules of etiquette. Interpretive conventions are not always formulated explicitly or with precision, although there is always a brisk business in guidebooks ready to fill you in on what you “need” to know. They are not always taught with rigor, although public acts of shaming (whether in a classroom or during a dinner conversation) can easily bend our behavior. They are historically variable, although there's always some continuity in the practices of a given culture. And different sorts of occasions allow both different sets of practices and different degrees of latitude: as Mrs. E. B. Duffey, for instance, pointed out in a once-famous guide to proper behavior, “it is not required of a gentleman in a railway car to relinquish his seat in favor of a lady,” but the situation is “different” in streetcars (91-92). More important, like rules of behavior—note the gendered underpinnings of Mrs. Duffey's rules of behavior—rules of reading carry with them certain effects that can be broadly described as “political,” in the sense that they reflect and influence the often-invisible systems of power relationships among various cultural and social groups.

So many rules govern social behavior that most people who have written about them have found it advisable to sort them according to what are assumed to be useful and appropriate categories. Mrs. Duffey, for instance, found it useful to break down “Etiquette for General Occasions” into rules for visits, rules for dinner parties and balls, and rules for courtship, among others. There are a similarly vast number of interpretive rules, and I have similarly found it helpful to keep them under control by sorting them into rough categories: rules of notice, signification, configuration, and coherence.⁴ Let me take each in turn.

First, rules of notice. Certain critics insist that it is possible to account for everything that happens in a novel. Florence Ridley, for instance, braces up her interpretation of Conrad with the claim that, unlike the readings of other critics, hers “take[s] into consideration all of its parts” (44). In fact, however—as should be especially clear to anyone who has just tried to whack through the linguistic underbrush of Heart of Darkness—there is always more in any text of substance than any one reader can possibly deal with. As a result, in order to read, we have to decide when to skim, and when to pay special attention. And to do this, we rely on rules that allow us to determine what moments count as the narrative high points. One rule applied to most narratives in our culture, for instance, gives priority to the ending, so it's not surprising that so many essays have mulled over the lie that Marlow tells to Kurtz's Intended.

Second, once the rules of notice have underscored specific details in the text, readers use what I call rules of signification to extract particular meanings out of them. Rules of signification tell us, for example, when it is appropriate to assume that a literary snake has symbolic overtones (as when Conrad compares the river to “an immense snake uncoiled” [p. 22]) and when, in fact, a snake is just a reptile (say, the swamp adder that Sherlock Holmes encounters in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”). Likewise, rules of signification would have to be deployed, explicitly or implicitly, for Claire Kahane to defend her interpretive claim that in Heart of Darkness, the word “‘horror’ echoes its homonym ‘whore’” (145).

Third, by applying rules of configuration, we can fit the details and their significances uncovered by the first two sets of rules into some more or less traditional preexisting design, thus allowing us to predict the course of the story to come. Rules of configuration lie at the heart of our literary expectations. For instance, one rule that operates in many texts of intense binary psychological conflict is a rule that I call the Rule of Magnetic Opposition. This rule urges us to expect that the line between protagonist and villain will turn out to be porous and that the protagonist will be tempted when drawn into the orbit of a sophisticated representative of evil who offers an invitation to explore the “dark side” of the psyche. This rule certainly generates expectations in Heart of Darkness, just as it generates expectations in such psychological thrillers as the film Black Widow or James Ellroy's novel The Big Nowhere. But rules of configuration are always double-edged. They certainly generate the satisfaction that results when expectations are fulfilled, for instance in Marlow's famous admission of complicity: “I did not betray Mr. Kurtz—it was ordered I should never betray him—it was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice” (p. 81). But at the same time, they fuel the surprise that results when expectations are frustrated. Thus, we are apt to be taken aback when Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis) flatly turns down Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver) when he tries to seduce her into his demented world of violence in Kathryn Bigelow's film Blue Steel; but that shock of reversal relies just as heavily on a prior rule of configuration as does the satisfaction of expectation in Heart of Darkness.

Finally, and most central to my essay here, there are rules of coherence, which allow us to fit the text together as a whole. As Norman N. Holland put it, “I have found it helpful to think of literary meaning spatially—as an idea that all the particular details of a work are ‘about’” (Dynamics 5). Particularly important are rules that allow us to wrap up a work in the mantle of some larger thematic abstraction, as when Jerry Wasserman argues that “style is the theme” of Heart of Darkness (103), or when Conrad himself suggests that the “idea” of the book is “the criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling the civilizing work in Africa” (Letters 139-40).

Any given reader is liable to apply different sets of rules to different kinds of texts. Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that genre is best understood not as a group of texts that share textual features but, rather, as a collection of texts that appear to invite similar interpretive strategies. And different readers, of course, are apt to apply different rules to the same text (this is what makes for interpretive difference). But—and this is a key point of my argument here—regardless of the text, regardless of the particular choices that a given reader makes as he or she processes it, those interpretive procedures always bring with them some kind of political edge.

To illustrate this claim, I would like to look at one of the specific rules of coherence that readers have widely (although not universally) used when trying to make sense of Heart of Darkness. At first, this might seem a quixotic project, for the interpretive procedures applied to the novel, even over the last forty years or so, appear nearly random. Indeed, there seems an almost bewildering variety of readings whose general outlines seem to shift with historical context, and whose details seem to vary from critic to critic even when the general outlines seem more or less stable. Especially before the New Criticism lost its respectability in college and university literature departments, for instance, critics often tried to make the novel cohere in terms of general claims about the nature of “Man.” Florence Ridley, for instance, sums up this perspective when she argues that “Conrad is concerned with the process of acquiring understanding of self” (45). But even within this general rubric, there was little apparent agreement. Albert Guerard's famous exploration of the novel maps it out as an instance of “the journey within” (ch. 1)—specifically, Marlow's “journey toward and through certain facets or potentialities of self,” his “spiritual voyage of self-discovery” (38). Lionel Trilling, looking at the novel from a different vantage point, sees Kurtz as “a hero of the spirit”—not an ordinary man, but someone who exemplifies “the essence of the modern belief about the nature of the artist, the man who goes down into that hell which is the historical beginning of the human soul” (18). Larry Sams offers yet a different spin: the novel “projects an existential choice: man may venture, like Kurtz, into the wilderness of his inner world, and from his own weakness … topple into madness and immoral behavior; or man may gaze, like Marlow, at the bestiality, … and manage enough control over the turbulence to live a moral life” (133).

“Nature of Man” interpretations are still common, I suspect, in many high school classes. But in university settings, readers are nowadays more apt to anchor themselves on more postmodern claims. For under the pressures of a growing disaffection with Enlightenment humanism in American universities, many academic readers steer away from universal “moral themes” (especially androcentric themes), making the novel cohere around issues of, say, language and textuality instead. Thus Charles Reeves, for instance, argues that “narratability” is the “obsessive theme” of both Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim (291). More specifically, he argues that because of the way Conrad sees language, his position approximates Friedrich Nietzsche's: “Indeed, its Nietzschean truth is that there is no truth-in-itself. … The narrative can disclose no perspective from which darkness and light may be finally differentiated” (303). Claire Kahane reads the novel in terms of linguistically and psychoanalytically inflected concerns. Arguing that modernist fictions tend to “substitute voice for plot, seducing the reader through a projection of the voice of the other rather than through the suspenseful turns of plot” (136), she concludes that the novel “evokes a seductive scene of hearing that echoes the ur-scenes of psychoanalysis” (137): that is, the so-called primal scene in which the infant witnesses or overhears the sexual activity of its parents. Indeed, she falls back on seduction and the primal scene not only to describe the technique of the novel but also to describe its “subject”: “the primal oral/aural desire” (Kahane 142). Peter Brooks sees Marlow's story as a cover-up. That is, “the resonance” of Marlow's “ethical pronouncements,” far from revealing the truth of his journey, in fact hide “a starker and possibly contradictory truth” (248). But this analysis leads, ultimately, not to moral and political insights but to linguistic insights: for Brooks, the rhetorical structure of the cover-up turns out to be more important than what is covered up, and the novel therefore finally makes sense as a self-reflective meditation on language and narrative. The “tale … is ultimately most of all about transmission” (261); thus, “One finally needs to read Heart of Darkness as act of narration even more than as narrative or as story” (261).

In some modern readings, in fact, the novel threatens to disappear into self-referentiality. Thus, while Donald M. Kartiganer concedes the novel's engagement with imperialism, he ends up erasing imperialism's political significance through a double interpretive reorientation. First, he affiliates the novel with a larger genre that he calls “the divided narrative form” (155), a genre in which “the central protagonist is divided in half, into an observer and an actor, each fully characterized yet incomplete without the other” (151). Second, he takes that generic equivalence as a sign of a common thematics—specifically, a thematics focusing on the act of interpretation itself. By equating “the action of the narrative” with “what Gadamer has described as the hermeneutic task” (Kartiganer 152), “the act of interpretation” becomes “an explicit focus for whatever happens in the narrative.” In the end, there's really no voyage to Africa at all. Rather, the text is transformed into “a formulation of criteria” for its own reading (Kartiganer 167).

Marlow as existential hero, Kurtz as artist-hero; the novel's subject as primal desires or as narratability: whatever else one can say, Heart of Darkness does not seem to encourage interpretive agreement. And yet, while what we might call the “content” of these readings may have varied, the procedure that generates them is far more stable. For all of the critics I have cited here in fact apply the same two-step rule of coherence, a rule that I call the Rule of Abstract Displacement. The first step involves an act of substitution: according to this rule, good literature is always treated as if it were about something else.⁵ That is, whatever a work appears to be about on the surface, you always discover—especially if you are discussing it in a literature class—that its “real” subject lies in something that's not immediately apparent from the surface. Animal Farm is not really “about” agriculture; Hamlet is not really “about” political infighting in the Danish court. This substitution is linked, however, to a second step, an act of generalization.⁶ As Holland puts it, traditional interpretive practice assumes that “literary meaning is a statement of what in the literary work is of sufficient generality to be ‘worth something to everybody’”—often in the form of a “universal proposition” (Dynamics 5).⁷ Thus, to give one concrete example of the Rule of Abstract Displacement in action: J. Hillis Miller, in the essay in this volume, suggests that Heart of Darkness is a “parabolic” text in that it is “a realistic story” used “to express another reality or truth not otherwise expressible” (206). I would put it differently. It's not that certain texts “are” parables, but that under certain circumstances—for instance, when reading a densely written canonical modernist novel in an academic setting—we are accustomed to reading texts as if they were.

The drive to apply the Rule of Abstract Displacement is often manifested in the drive to read metaphorically. That drive is, in fact, so strong in our culture that it sometimes seems as if we had misheard the famous Star Wars injunction as “Metaphors be with you!” As a consequence, it is hard to resist the metaphorical potential of a text even when confronted by an explicit textual warning against it. Indeed, academic reading often exhibits what I call the Cat People phenomenon. I take the term from Jacques Tourneur's 1942 film with a screenplay by DeWitt Bodeen—a film famous in its own day and recanonized by its incorporation into Manuel Puig's novel Kiss of the Spider Woman.⁸ In Cat People, Oliver Reed (played by Kent Smith) falls in love with Irena (Simone Simon), who tells him that she can't reciprocate because of a curse placed on the Serbian village in which she grew up: at the moment of sexual union, she will turn into a leopard and destroy her lover. Oliver, who overestimates his own patience in such matters, convinces her to marry him nonetheless. But as the marital consummation is continually deferred (and, consequently, de-furred), he finally persuades her to see a psychiatrist.

The session between Irena and her psychiatrist turns quickly into a dispute about the proper interpretive rules for Irena's narrative. Should the connection between woman and feline be read as an instance of literal transformation, or is it a metaphor for something else? Irena insists on interpreting the curse concretely and specifically: she will in fact turn into a literal cat. Her psychiatrist, in contrast, believes that it should be understood as a representation by similarity: the cat is but a metaphorical projection of her psychosexual anxieties. The film's conclusion is a strong warning against rampant metaphorization: when the psychiatrist tries to prove his point by forcing himself on Irena, she turns into a leopard and, in a scene cast entirely in shadows, claws him to death.

What's more curious about this movie is the way in which viewers tend to “read” that scene. Certainly, on the level of what I've elsewhere called the narrative audience (the audience that views the events as “real”), Irena's is the “correct” reading of the situation. Nonetheless, as actual viewers trying to join the authorial audience (trying to understand the film as a work of art),⁹ we are apt to continue to interpret as the psychiatrist does, and to treat the cat nonetheless as a metaphor. That is, at least for those accustomed to reading in academic terms, the story seems more evocative, and certainly more discussable “as literature,” when read as a parable about the dangers of female desire than when read as a matter-of-fact narrative of a woman who turns into a killer cat.¹⁰ That the film explicitly raises the possibility of that interpretation and then controverts it does not seem to have much impact on the way it is understood. And if the drive to read abstractly is so strong that even a firm admonition about the dangers of metaphoric reading is apt to be read metaphorically, what is likely to happen to a book, like Heart of Darkness, that doesn't have such warnings? It's no surprise, then, that the Rule of Abstract Displacement has almost completely colonized writings about Conrad's novel.

Thus, while the content of the thematization has shifted from claims about the “journey within” to claims about the act of interpretation, the same basic interpretive gesture has served as a common foundation. That is—to abstract from these readers in the same way that they abstract from the text—there is a continuity to these superficially varying interpretations, not in terms of what they see as the true “meaning” of the text but in terms of how they get to it. They all move by displacement from the specific to the abstract.

I have argued that this interpretive process is political. In what way? Simply this: these interpretations all share a hierarchical value system that privileges the second stage, the abstract. To give a particularly clear example: Jacques Berthoud takes on those critics who have faulted Conrad for being “insufficiently specific” about Kurtz's “inconceivable ceremonies and nameless lusts.” He does so by maintaining that the specific facts do not really matter, since “what finally damns Kurtz is not the horror of the shrunken heads … nor even the ferocity of his raiding excursions, but what these things indicate” (54; emphasis added). For my purposes here, what Berthoud sees as the end result (or the content) of Kurtz's fall (the fact that by “tak[ing] upon himself the role of God … he has entered into a state of final self-deception” [54]) is less significant than the route he follows: Berthoud acts on the assumption that the specifics of the text, the surface details, “indicate” something both more general and more important.

It is in this notion of hierarchical “indicating” that we can see the political drift of this critical continuity. That is, while all of these critics point us “toward” different things which are designated as primary, they all point us away from the same thing which is deemed to be secondary: Conrad's specific descriptions of the horrors of an imperialist venture, precisely those aspects of the novel that might prompt a reader to think seriously about the problems of racism. Thus, among other things, they turn us away from the concrete images of the starvation brought by the Europeans. Think, for instance, of Marlow's harrowing description of the members of the chain gang: “I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope” (p. 30). Or think of the workers on the boat, paid “every week” with “three pieces of brass wire,” forced to live on “a few lumps of some stuff like half-cooked dough, of a dirty lavender colour, they kept wrapped in leaves, and now and then swallowed a piece of, but so small that it seemed done more for the look of the thing than for any serious purpose of sustenance” (p. 57). What moral actions are we, as readers, engaged in when we take such images as indications of something more important?

Of course, as I suggested at the beginning of this essay, not all critics rely on abstract displacement: there are many, especially now in the wake of Achebe, who employ different rules of coherence—rules that in fact elevate the issues of race and imperialism as the primary materials of the novel. Granted, too, not all applications of the Rule of Abstract Displacement are political in the same way: it is an interpretive paradigm that underlies many feminist and anti-imperialist arguments, too. But I think it is fair to say that with regard to this particular text, the applications of the rule by many of the critics I have cited do have political consequences in common, consequences for the way they encourage readers to act. These critics are, furthermore, representative of a large body of influential Conrad criticism. As a result, in many classrooms, built into the very strategies students are trained to enlist as they interpret the text, are procedures that minimize the importance of such issues as race and imperialism by treating them, generally implicitly, as “less important” than such issues as the journey within and primal desires.

Thus, for instance, for Gloria Young, who extends the ground first cleared by Freud and Holland, Conrad is using the issues of colonialism to illustrate more important issues of psychology, specifically “Kurtz's regression into the unconscious primary processes, what Freud would call the id” (Young 255), exemplifying “what can result when the ego loses control of the unconscious processes of both the id and the superego” (Young 256). Even Bette London, whose aim is to trace out the political elements in the novel, nonetheless finds herself entangled in abstract displacement, as if infected by the critical climate in which she finds herself: “Constructing himself in Kurtz's image,” she argues, “Marlow fulfills the colonial imperative Kurtz both travesties and enacts. He participates in what Henry Staten has called … Kurtz's ‘sadistic project of mastery,’ the epitome of the colonial design: ‘the desire to force by violence a response from an unmoved and indifferent nature which is imaged as female.’ Badgering his audience, as he does periodically, Marlow assaults their indifference, subjecting them to violent verbal harangues” (246). The moves here are significant: what begins with a clear recognition of the sadism of colonialism ends with the displacement of that physical brutality by equating it with Marlow's verbal style.

Some critics, such as Gary Adelman, have criticized this kind of displacement, but have placed the blame on Conrad himself, arguing that his novel is structured in such a way as to demand such reading strategies. There is certainly some validity to that observation. Heart of Darkness contains none of Cat People's warnings against metaphorizations, and plenty of apparent invitations to think symbolically. Indeed, Conrad himself noted in a letter that in “the last pages” of the book “the interview of the man and the girl … makes of that story something quite on another plane than an anecdote of a man who went mad in the Centre of Africa” (Letters 417). One thinks, too, of Marlow's description of the need to pay attention to hidden banks, sunken stones, and other potential dangers during his travel on the river:

I had to keep guessing at the channel; I had to discern, mostly by inspiration, the signs of hidden banks; I watched for sunken stones; I was learning to clap my teeth smartly before my heart flew out, when I shaved by a fluke some infernal sly old snag that would have ripped the life out of the tin-pot steamboat and drowned all the pilgrims; I had to keep a look-out for the signs of dead wood we could cut up in the night for the next day's steaming. When you have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality—the reality, I tell you—fades. The inner truth is hidden—luckily, luckily.

(p. 49-50)

One rule of signification commonly applied to novels of this density urges us to treat such descriptions as metaphors for the act of reading the text: Doesn't that mean that Conrad wanted us to abstract from the concrete details?

Perhaps. Still, there is reason to believe that Conrad didn't intend the level of abstraction we find in contemporary critics of his novel. He himself insisted, in fact, that he had started with “definite images” rather than “an abstract notion” (Letters 158, 157) and admitted “the fault of having made Kurtz too symbolic or rather symbolic at all” (Letters 460). And even if Conrad did intend a certain measure of abstraction, are readers therefore absolved of responsibility for uncritically repeating that gesture? The key word here is “uncritically.” My point is not that we should resist creating coherence in the texts we read, or even that we should resist the urge to seek that coherence in thematic abstractions. Nor am I suggesting that those readers who have found Heart of Darkness to be a source of insight into the human condition or the nature of narrative are somehow “wrong” in their interpretive conclusions. Rather, I hope to suggest that these interpretations, like all interpretations, have a political dimension—and that by participating in such readings without, at the same time, engaging in some self-reflection about what we are doing, we run the risk of habituating ourselves to problematic patterns of thought, blindly accepting—like the European crowds “electrified” by Kurtz's speeches (p. 89) or the Africans who “adored” him (p. 72)—what we ought to be holding up for discussion and debate.

Notes

1. The essay was reprinted several times; and when Achebe revised it for inclusion in Hopes and Impediments, he changed the word “bloody” to the less inflammatory “thoroughgoing.” This retrospective act of moderation, however, was ineffectual, since critics universally cite the earlier version.

2. Although this essay centers on the interpretation of literature, similar issues arise in the other arts as well. For a study of parallel issues in music, see, for instance, my “Whiting the Wrongs of History.”

3. Given the diversity of reader critics—broader than that within many other theoretical camps—it is perhaps appropriate to define my position with respect to that of some of my colleagues. Since my attention is directed toward interpretive procedures, especially those in place before the act of reading begins, I differ from those critics (for instance, the early Stanley Fish represented by “Affective Stylistics”) whose main pursuit is reading as a temporal process, as well as from those (like David Bleich toward the end of Readings and Feelings) who are primarily concerned with how already completed interpretations are mediated within a particular community. Unlike Janice A. Radway in Reading the Romance or Norman N. Holland in 5 Readers Reading, I am concerned here with hypothetical, rather than flesh-and-blood, readers—although I do, of course, take my evidence from the writings of actual (professional) readers. Finally, unlike many subjectivists, my focus here is on the experiences that readers share, rather than on their disagreements.

4. For a fuller discussion, see my Before Reading.

5. Although this rule is rarely expressed so baldly, one does find critics who assert it without apology. Wolfgang Iser, for instance, claims that “Whatever realities are transposed into the text, they turn into signs for something else” (3).

6. True, with a limited group of texts (such as romans à clef), the reader substitutes something existing on more or less the same level of specificity as the original text. But more often than not, that “something else” is more abstract than what the text seems to mean on the surface.

7. In this influential book, of course, Holland separates his own practice from that of the New Critics—although his own procedure, to seek a “central fantasy or daydream … particular manifestations of which occur all through the text” (Dynamics 7) is not as far from New Critical practice as he believes.

8. There was also a later film with the title Cat People, although a substantially different plot, starring Nastassia Kinski.

9. For further explanation, see Before Reading, pages 93-104. For another distinction that can provide similar kinds of insights, see James Phelan's differentiations among three components of literary characters: the synthetic (a character as an artistic “construct”), the mimetic (characters as “images of possible people”), and the thematic (a character as support for larger thematic concern) (2-3).

10. It may be for similar reasons that psychological readings of Henry James's Turn of the Screw, in which the governess is mad, continue to be more popular in academic settings than literal readings in which the ghosts she sees are real.

One of the most pleasant reader responsibilities is acknowledging friends and colleagues who have helped frame and refine arguments. In particular, I would like to thank Jamie Barlowe, Florence Martin, Maureen Miller, Nancy Rabinowitz, Mary Ann Smart, Michael Smith, Priscilla Walton, and the students of Mary Beth Shaddy's 1993-94 AP English classes in Dimond High School, Anchorage, Alaska.

Works Cited

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