Let's Embrace the Ambiguity and Arbitrariness of Language

I start from the assumption that Joseph Conrad’s novel entitled Hearth of Darkness published in 1899 in Britain does not have any particular meaning at all, since it can be interpreted as a strong criticism of the Western ideology of colonisation and civilisation in contrast to the fact that many post-colonial critics have accused the book of being an echo of the colonialist Western discourse. The methods by way of which I promote the text’s undecidability are primarily determined by its complexity and ambiguity, and the slipperiness in the nature of language itself. I’d like to initially acknowledge that Hearth of Darkness is a text produced by language, a set of rules of grammar and syntax by means which it constitutes the text and is believed to make sense to us. That being the case, I intent to follow the guideline formulated by Jacques Derrida and further discuss the question of reality in terms of its causation, to show the impossibility of reaching a meaning in Conrad’s story and interpret it as an indecisive set of operations of ideologies rather than a particular text that promotes the ideology of colonisation of the Western Imagination.

In the nature of the grammatical and syntactical rules that language forms itself, there is indeed the possibility to estimate the very many choices it offers to us. In his book Critical Theory Today, Lois Tyson gives an example to illustrate how a single sentence constituted by language can have several meanings: “Time flies like an arrow.” The majority of the English speakers would be acquainted with this saying that means ‘time passes quickly’ to any member of the interpretive community of that language. When we are asked to make additional meanings from the same sentence, as Tyson argues, it can also mean that “time moves in one direction, or straight ahead, because that’s how arrows fly.” On the other hand, if someone who generally speaks in the imperative mode, telling us to do something, uttered this sentence, we could argue that the sentence tells us to time the speed of flies as if we were timing the speed of an arrow. Moreover, what if there was an insect kind that lived in an exotic place of the world and was named as times flies? In this case, as Tyson gives the example, the sentence would mean that a particular kind of flies, named as Time Flies, are fond of one particular arrow. Therefore, one has really no idea of the direction language leads us to; there are many of them, while some of which are more plausible than others, none is definite. Thus, the assertion of the structural linguistics that language is nonreferential because it does not refer to things in the world but only to our concepts of things has long been replaced with the idea that language actually refers to neither of them, but to the play of signifiers of which language itself consists. Jacques Derrida explains it by affirming that meaning is never present and its signified presence is always reconstituted by deferral, which one might call a never-ending deferral of meaning that is inherent in the nature of language. 

No doubt that many post-colonial critics would associate Heart of Darkness with the Mythos of Autumn amongst the three other categories that are structured and claimed to include all literary texts in the essay entitled “The Archetypes of Literature” by Northrop Frye. “There are four such categories: the romantic, the tragic, the comic, and the ironic or satiric.” Since Conrad’s story involves Marlowe’s experience as a movement from the ideal world to the real world, the story indeed seems to be falling under the Mythos of Autumn. 
In his ideal world in the beginning of the book, Marlowe says “Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration.” The desire of Marlowe as a little boy reveals the discourse that was dominant in the 19^th Century in Britain and particularly promoted the idea of exploring the distant lands. Yet, Marlowe’s ideas and desires change towards the end of the novel as he says “…a moment it seemed to me as if I also were buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets. I felt an intolerable weight oppressing my breast, the smell of the damp earth, the unseen presence of victorious corruption, the darkness of an impenetrable night…” (130). Hence, one can rightly claim that Conrad’s story involves a movement from the ideal where Marlowe has the desire to go and explore the distant lands to the real where he encounters with the colonial practices in Africa and gets disappointed with them. It would not be illogical to claim that Heart of Darkness can be evaluated under the Mythos of Autumn amongst the three other categories that are structured Northrop Frye.

On the other hand, I’d rather think of Heart of Darkness as belonging to the Mythos of Winter, a sort of satire where the reader is forced to face with the real world of experience, uncertainty, failure and hence the minus attitude of imperialism. Frye associates the Mythos of Winter with the satire and irony, and I find Conrad’s story a very ironic one in that it symbolizes a process in which the glorious imperial attitude of the British Empire dissolves into the reality of the African people who, by showing their humanity, are themselves the reason to call the British practices in Africa despotism. When the whole of the story is evaluated, it is clear that Conrad applies an ironic approach towards the decline of the British Empire by presenting us Marlowe, a character whose ideals of exploration are disturbed by the realisation that something is wrong and it needs to be re-thought. Consequently, Heart of Darkness can also be evaluated under the Mythos of Winter amongst the other categories of Frye, and therefore, it can be claimed that it is impossible to evaluate Heart of Darkness through the structure of literary genres that Frye theorised.

According to Jonathan Culler, there is a structural body of unconsciously internalised codes that lead us to the way we make meaning from literature. The two major ones of Culler’s codes are the rules of metaphorical coherence and thematic unity, while the other three ones are the convention of distance and impersonality, naturalisation, and the rule of significance. The rule of metaphorical coherence is simply “the requirement that the two components of a metaphor have a consistent relationship within the context of the work.” For instance, T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” evolves around the theme of the pettiness and triviality of the world that is haunted by the modern age, and within this content, it is coherent that the evening is resembled to an etherized patient since the stillness of the evening is promoting the idea that the modern man lives a life of alienation and distance from the world and other people. Culler would suggest that the rule of metaphorical coherence is ensured by the text, and we, consciously or unconsciously, have this code internalised that promotes the way through which we dwell in structures and make meaning. What if a metaphor is not suitable to the context of the text? Culler does not have a suggestion at this point. However, one might think that if we make meaning out of a text through the five codes of Culler and the rule of metaphorical coherence is one of the major codes, and if the rule of metaphorical coherence is not ensured in the text, then the way through which we make meaning is disturbed and problematic; we are no longer able to make meaning out of the text after all. For instance, the symbol of ‘ivory’ is a very significant metaphor in Heart of Darkness as it stands-in for the European lust and greed for acquiring raw material from the colonies, together with representing the whiteness and the European way of rationalisation. At this point, one might question the European inquiry for ivory in a land that is not Europe at all. Does Europe need to prove itself as a means of superiority through the way that establishes its superiority on the basis of the difference between themselves and the Africans? The ivory metaphor might signify the idea that the European society is not sure about its own identity and it tries to establish the boundary between itself and the rest of the world by creating something (ivory) valuable for itself and seeing it as a natural necessity to acquire the treasure. Consequently, when we try to structure Conrad’s Heart of Darkness through the unconscious interpretative codes that Jonathan Culler suggested, it is impossible to criticise the book as a defender of the Western ideology of colonisation and exploitation since the rule of metaphorical coherence does not provide a coherence with the thematic unity suggested by the criticism that claims that the book promotes the colonialist discourse.

How do we make sense out of language from the structuralism’s point of view? In his Course In General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure asserts a systematic structure of language that dominates the process of the production of meaning, and hence the cognizance of meaning. According to Saussure’s structure, there is always a signifier, a signified and eventually a sign. He talks about the function of sign by saying that “the linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image.” To illustrate, he gives the example of the concept of ‘arbor’ and its reflection in human mind, either in the sound form, verbally spoken as ‘tree’, or in the form of an image of ‘tree’. He argues that there is the concept of an arbor in one’s mind first, which is signified by a signifier in the form of either an image or a sound, and he calls the two a sign as a whole. Saussure says that: “the bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary”, which eventually leads him to call the sign itself arbitrary.

I’d like to carry Saussure’s structure of language to a more macro-cosmic level over the text and assert that Marlowe’s experience in Africa can be seen as a signifier while the treatment of White Man to the indigenous African people can be asserted as the signified. Yet the question remains: what is the sign? What is more important is the question that what kind of a structure can allow us to call the sign in Hearth of Darkness something that is incontrovertible? Herein, we make sense out of language arbitrarily, a particular way of arbitrariness that is consciously or unconsciously present in our Reality-Of-Reading, shaping the meaning according to the discourses we are coded to perceive the world in a particular notion within the World-Reality. As a matter of fact, we are able to give meaning to the systematic significance of language, for instance call a red rose ‘red rose’ and associate it with the desire and love, and thus we are able to create the meaning in a text in terms of the position we are standing to it, creating our own Reality-Of-Reading within the boundaries of a community or subjectivity. Interpreting such particularly ambiguous literary works as Heart of Darkness, we make sense out of language in the way that our cognition is shaped to make sense out of it and therefore, it is impossible to evaluate a literary text like Heart of Darkness through a certain structure that is not questionable.

Carl Gustav Jung talks about archetypes that are primitive mental images “inherited from the earliest human ancestors, and supposed to be present in the collective unconscious”, and says that archetypes can be best observed in myths that “are first and foremost psychic phenomena.” According to Jung, all the mythologized processes of external nature is “symbolic expressions of the inner, unconscious drama of the psyche.” Therefore, what is in the Western myth can be said to be the real and actual intention of the Western ideology. Roland Barthes elaborates Saussure’s idea and says that “the signification is the myth itself, just as the Saussurean sign is the word (or more accurately the concrete unit).” Hence, there is the myth that reserves the truth according to Jung, which is a combination of the signifier and the signified, carrying the signification according to Barthes. If this idea of ‘myth’ was adapted to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, one could claim that Marlowe totally believes in the Western myth of colonisation and civilisation in the beginning of his journey. It is no doubt that before he experienced the actual practices of White Man in Africa, Marlowe was under the magic of the Western discourse of colonisation that promotes the idea of exploring the foreign lands. As Jung would claim, the myth that factionalises the foreign ways of life and justifies White Man’s journeys to those lands turns out to be the ideology itself.

Conrad’s story is indisputably flexible to interpret as it is like a dream-vision story that enables critics to make their own meanings over the ideologies presented in the book, as I have done in the above paragraph. For another instance, in his essay An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Chinua Achebe claims that Conrad is being a defender of the Western discourse of colonisation and racism by factionalising the African way of life in Hearth of Darkness. Achebe argues that Conrad “projects the image of Africa as ‘the other world,’ the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality." In his assertion, what Achebe ignores is the fact that an antithesis is the negation of the thesis (in Hegelian dialectics analysis, it must bring us to an affirmation) by definition and blaming Conrad’s story for being a defender of the Western discourse of colonisation and racism would be an act of turning a blind eye to the fact that Conrad’s image of Africa was different than what he used to know as the way of life as a European citizen and therefore, his given account of this land must not supposedly be about being superior or inferior, that is to say, civilised or uncivilised. Achebe’s claim is based on the consideration of Conrad’s direct and objective narration of Marlowe’s story, ignoring that Conrad himself sailed to Africa and had an actual impression of the lives of the indigenous African people. Nobody would dare to claim that the African way of live is the same with the European one; they are just different and the disclosure of the difference is not supposed to seek profit of marginalising one of the groups. The negation is in the mind of West and Conrad neither shows any support for it, nor expresses anything about the negativity that comes with the difference. One can easily see that Conrad is being totally neutral about every practice of the indigenous Africans. If Conrad distorted what he himself actually saw in Africa through Marlowe’s story, then Achebe’s claim would be logical. Yet, Conrad tells his story from an impartial point of view and when it comes to interpret the indigenous people’s practices, for example their search for food, Conrad writes:

“Yes; I looked at them as you would on any human being, with a curiosity of their impulses, motives, capacities, weaknesses, when brought to the test of inexorable physical necessity. Restraint! What possible restraint?  What is superstition, disgust, patient, fear – or some kind of primitive honour? No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust doesn’t simply exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze. Don’t you know the devilry of lingering starvation, its exasperating torment, its black thoughts, its somber and brooding ferocity? Well, I do. It takes a man all his inborn strength to fight hunger properly."

When it comes to a natural need of human beings, Conrad justifies the actions of the indigenous African people and shows that their actions have no difference from what White Man would do in the same situation. In fact, Africans seem like an alter-ego of Europeans in the above extract on the grounds of that if their felicity was distorted, White Man would also do the same. It can be said that Heart of Darkness is a text that is approaching the events from a neutral point of view rather than factionalising the African way of life as Achebe claims.

The signifier and the signified bring us to the fact that there is no single meaning in the book that is possibly produced by language, although both are closely brought together around the idea of interfering in the life of indigenous African people. The sign must be thought, to a great extent, relevant to the Western discourse of colonisation and civilisation, whether supporting or criticising it. At this point, Saussure’s structure-based idea of meaning enables us only to encounter with a juxtaposition of signs. The Saussurean one-dimensional structuralism remains inadequate as the signifier (Marlowe’s travel) in the book might be signifying whether the inhuman treatment of White Man or White Man’s desire to better the lives of African people in the European way, which will eventually make a difference in terms of the sign presented in the book.

In his Mythologies, Roland Barthes asserts that “myth is a peculiar system, in that it is constructed from a semiological chain which existed before it: it is a second-order semiological system.” According to him, every myth is a signifier of another chain of meanings. Basically, Barthes says that there is a signifier, a signified, and a sign that is also a signifier of another meaning that has a signified and a sign. Barthes draws an analogy between his two-dimensional semiological system and language-myth relationship: 

"In myth there are two semiological systems, one of which is staggered in relation to the other: a linguistic system, the language (or the modes of representation which are assimilated to it), which I shall call language-object, because it is the language which myth gets hold of in order to build its own system; and myth itself, which I shall call meta-language, because it is a second language, in which one speaks about the first."

The meta-language, in Barthes’s terms, is consisted of the language-object and designed to represent the ideology through the language-object. That is to say, the myth is not only a representative of the ideology, but also a semiological structure through which the ideology is expressed and its representations are presented in an endless chain of meanings. In this respect, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness can be said a text that contains two signifiers nested into and juxtaposed with each other: one is the Western discourse itself and the other is the criticism of it. The first is like Barthes’s meta-language, and the second is the language-object. As Barthes asserts that there cannot be a myth without the language-object since it is the main component creating the myth, the same argument can be applied to Conrad’s story: How can one criticise the Western Myth without using the Western Myth’s fundamental components at all? If there was not the Western ideology of colonisation in Hearth of Darkness, could it be possible to inform the reader about that ideology and the consequences of its practices? Heart of Darkness can be said to be a tool that uses the Western Myth to talk about it and, in Derrida’s terms, to deconstruct it. Consequently, the book can be well read as a criticism of the Western discourse of colonisation and civilisation, while Achebe’s argument still remains supportable and an archetypal reading proves the opposite.

Does my title imply that Hearth of Darkness is a deconstructing book that hovers around the subject of a metaphorical experience through achluophobia and claims that there is no such a thing as the sun shines everywhere, or rather, does it simply say that this part of the essay is going to be about deconstructing Joseph Conrad’s book entitled Hearth of Darkness? Why does one need to deconstruct a text that was written centuries ago? I’d claim that we, as the literary critics, always have the possibility of reading a text in a direction that we consciously or unconsciously promote, while the naturalisation of our reading is only bound to a simple logic that we internalise. In the way of actualising the pattern of thought we understand and criticise a text, the tool we make us of is known as language. There is indeed a nervousness in the process through which we try to reach episteme through language. As Jacques Derrida famously claims that the outside of the text is unattainable and the major and only component of text is language that never points out a meaning that can be purely acquired. Real is blurred and it is impossible to avoid of context in which there is no difference between real and unreal, logic and absurd, center and periphery, since the context is always embedded with presentation together with its representation. Derrida argues:

"With the difference between real presence and presence in representation, a whole system of differences involved in language is implied in the same deconstruction: the differences between the represented and the representative in general, the signified and signifier, simple presence and its reproduction, presentation and re-presentation, for what is represented in the representation is a presentation."

We are in the presence of irrationality when we lean on language that differs endlessly down in the chain of meanings and makes an empirical acquisition of knowledge impossible.

Derrida attaches the utmost importance to writing as he says “beyond and behind what one believes can be circumscribed as Rousseau’s text, there has never been anything but writing… What opens meaning and language is writing as the disappearance of natural presence.” On the other hand, considering the fact that  a major quality of what I call the World-Real is that it is echoic in our imagination rather than an absence of creation, the initial error here in Derrida’s claim is that, like Lacan’s the Real is not a matter to us since it is not a even cause to itself (even it is so, that is beyond imagination), Derrida’s text is not a matter to us unless we make it a cause to ourselves or itself by the activity of reading. The old metaphor of a fish that is not able to comprehend the existence of water is very similar to the condition of man who is not able to comprehend the text, outside of which does not exist to himself. In the World-Real, we have the ability of reading in a surface whose reality is not open to discussion at this point since it is the cause that matters. Similar to the way a fish searches for clean waters to better the conditions he is in and not try to get beyond the water, which is impossible, unknowable and unimaginable; we have to deal with the World-Real to have it on our side, rather than talking about the beyond that is impossible to reach.

What I try to do in this reading of Heart of Darkness can be called the interaction with the World-Real and how I do it is the Reality-of-Reading. Humans construct a reality and then they judge the conceptual rightfulness of actions in this reality. All is negotiable, and that is the task of the critic. The fact that I presented the text as an indecisive and ambiguous one that cannot be structured in one way or another is an effort to show the reader that they approach and perceive the text in a particular way so that they can reach a meaning. Therefore, one can conclude here that the Reality-Of-Reading is a constructed meta-narrative that we are forced to perceive in a particular way that can easily be dismantled, hence it is multiple. The world is a huge fragmented unity and presented us as meaningless and out of joint. The task of uniting the fragments is left to us and we need a sort of logic when approaching these fragments of the world. There is no meaning, but a particular way to make what we call meaning. In this sense, language is the foremost tool that we adapt to make meaning out of the fragmented and unique segments of the world. When we look at mountains, rivers and other natural beauties, the presentation and other associations are also coming with them as the text Heart of Darkness carries many associations with itself. Consequently, the way the reader responses to a text reveals the way human beings response to what is used to be called the reality.

I’d like to embrace the ambiguity and arbitrariness in the nature of language and acknowledge that the slipperiness of meaning is there in Hearth of Darkness where Conrad does the only thing he could possibly do through language: Showing the stage and leaving the rest to the reader who can either find colonialist and racist discourses as Achebe does, or see the strong criticism of the Western ideology of colonisation and civilisation in the adventures of Marlowe. I believe that Conrad’s story is a blessing for those who are determined to criticise the myth of colonisation in the imagination of the White Man, rather than a text that is to be thrown to the other side of the wall and labeled as a defender of the Western discourse of colonisation and racism.