• 1 “In the secret dictionary of novel criticism […] objects are weak metonyms for the subjects they ad (...)

2Conrad was not Dickens or Flaubert, though he knew them very well, and long descriptions of innumerable objects do not abound in his fiction. Many of the objects which do find their place in his stories however mark out significant moments, so much so that they have become emblematic and their meaning has been the source of controversies, interpretations and re-interpretations. The young captain’s hat in “The Secret Sharer” is one such example, as is the jubilee sixpence in “Karain” or Brierly’s gold chronometer in Lord Jim. Such objects stick out, as if they could be detached from the continuum of the narrative in order to become meaningful and often powerful images in the readers’ minds. Others on the contrary seem to be present only to contribute to a “reality effect”,1 since they cannot be interpreted allegorically and/or do not have a function in the plot: they look like unimportant details. Such are the sorts of objects I would like to deal with in this paper, focusing on Heart of Darkness.

• 2 The question of the ivory and white worsted in the novella has already been studied by Ryan Francis (...)
• 3 Letter to R.B. Cunningham Graham, Feb. 8, 1899.

3Because “material interests” are so important in Conrad’s fiction, I want to concentrate on the material dimension of objects, in order to see “why and how [the author] use[s] objects to make meaning […]” (Brown 4): apparently unimportant details create circuits of meaning, shedding light not only on the characters they are associated with or belong to, but more generally on how colonialism works and what it implies, as is the case with objects made in ivory. I will then focus on one particular case, the white worsted in the “grove of death” scene,2 a detail that arrests Marlow’s gaze and throws light on Conrad’s aesthetic strategy in Heart of Darkness when dealing with what Marlow calls the “unspeakable”, “wrapping up the idea in secondary notions” (Conrad 1986, 157)³ as he put it in one letter, but also helping readers find out “the meaning of [the] episode” (Conrad 2006, 5).

• 4 Such disconnection between object and use also suggests a world in which causality has become probl (...)

4If one concentrates on the objects at the beginning of Heart of Darkness, apart from the mention of sails, canvas and other elements which constitute the ship’s tackle, we notice that there are very few of them: an “only cushion” and an “only rug” on which the lawyer sits, “a box of dominoes” (Conrad 2006, 3), and that is about all. At the end of the story, when Marlow visits the Intended, the description of her drawing-room is slightly more detailed, with “the bent gilt legs and backs of the furniture […] the tall marble fireplace […] a grand piano […] with dark gleams on the flat surfaces like a somber and polished sarcophagus” (73). The narrators are different, but in both cases, their descriptions concentrate on just a few objects which are apparently mentioned in order to characterize the characters’ social background. As a consequence, these objects are seen but not used in the fiction: as the frame narrator notices, “we did not begin that game of dominoes” (4); and at the Intended’s, no fire is lit in the fireplace, no one plays the piano. Similarly, later in the story, a majority of objects mentioned by Marlow cannot be used, either because, like the “boiler wallowing in the grass” or the “railway-truck lying […] on its back with its wheels in the air” (15), they are wrecked and no longer of use, or because like Towson’s manual, they are written, if not “in cipher” at least in a language Marlow cannot understand, or even because they are repeatedly evoked, hoped for, promised […] but remain absent, like the rivets.⁴ If such objects are mentioned, it is not because of their use value, or because they are instrumental in the progression of events: nothing that happens in the story happens because of them. It seems that their only function is to be seen and mentioned by the narrators, and particularly by Marlow, their uselessness being a way for him of characterizing the situation in Africa.

• 5 “[…] le détail se manifestait alors comme un écart ou une résistance par rapport à l’ensemble du ta (...)
• 6 “Mais le détail peut aussi se manifester comme le lieu où s’est condensé l’investissement du tablea (...)

6Details, art critic Daniel Arasse tells us, are meant to be “revealing.” Surprising us, they strike our gaze because they look either superfluous or they distract us from the general meaning of the work. Details convey “information which is different from the overall message of the work”.5 Thanks to them, the “work’s content or intention is either veiled or unveiled” (Arasse 10). They stop our gaze and disrupt the logic of interpretation, opening new paths,6 favouring unexpected associations (23) and suggesting new modes of approach: details may seem unimportant or trivial, but they can also be read as “signs” that beckon to us, indicating that there may be other ways of reading a painting, for example. Arasse deals with the visual arts, but his remarks may also apply to literature and particularly Heart of Darkness.

• 7 Freedgood concentrates on Victorian literature. In Jane Eyre for instance, she shows that “mahogany (...)

8Thus objects are two-faced: considered in relation with characters, they can be interpreted as revealers of their psychology and serve as elements of characterization or contribute to the creation of an atmosphere, in true Victorian fashion. But there is another way of seeing them, which has to do with where they come from, how they were obtained, why they are where they are, what amount of work or servicing they need, etc., in other words with their history as objects outside the text. In The Ideas in Things, Elaine Freedgood insists on the fact that “objects in texts may have connections beyond the covers of the text, or outside the frame of the narrative” (Freedgood 11), pointing out that things that tend to be considered as pertaining only to the reality effect should be considered for themselves, “in terms of their own properties and history”, as they may enable us to perceive “the play of history” “haunting” the text, although generally overlooked.⁷ Objects may look like details, but their own story throws a different light on the general picture: seen as elements in a system of relationships, they point to the material realities dealt with in Heart of Darkness. Therefore, they shed light on the economic and cultural implications of the story told by Marlow. From that point of view, objects in the novella have a lot to tell us about colonialism, and more particularly that economy and culture cannot be dissociated. In fact, it is in the presence of objects, in their description and in the way they are characterized, as much as in the relationships between characters, that the reality of colonialism is made clear:

• 8 In “An Outpost of Progress”, Carlier also characterizes them as “rubbish” and “rags” (Conrad 1983, (...)

9Saying this, Marlow points out that the presence of objects there is the result of exchanges: the station is filled with “manufactured goods” coming from Europe, which he characterizes as “rubbishy”,8 to be exchanged for “precious […] ivory” (Conrad 2006, 18). The imbalance in this system of circulation and exchange is double as is underlined by the choice of adjectives and of a water metaphor that contrasts the abundance of valueless trade goods from Europe with the scarceness of what is really valuable and valued, i.e. ivory. Objects therefore become symptoms of the reality of the colonial situation and work as material contradiction to the “civilizing work” (90) extolled by Marlow’s aunt (12): if the Europeans bring quantities of objects to Africa and get little out of it, profit is nevertheless on their side, and there is no chance of “civilizing” the natives with glass beads and brass-wire.

• 9 The name of Kurtz occurs 122 times; the pilgrims are mentioned 31 times as well. Clearly, if we tru (...)

11The word “ivory” recurs only 31 times in the story.9 Yet its presence can be felt throughout the text if one pays attention to details, marking out important scenes, creating a network of signification and links that “make of that story something quite on another plane than an anecdote of a man who went mad in the centre of Africa” as Conrad put it in one of his letters (Conrad 1986, 417). Throughout Marlow’s stay in Africa and his quest for Kurtz, “the word ivory would ring in the air” (Conrad 2006, 35), and it is quite significant that, as the narrator tells us in “An Outpost of Progress”, “the storehouse [for ivory] was called the fetish” (Conrad 1983, 89), a term that underlines the layer of values ivory is endowed with: an image of power invested with an erotic dimension (Kurtz’s African mistress is covered with “the value of several elephant tusks”; Conrad 2006, 60), ivory is also the object of what Marx called “commodity fetishism”. For Marx, commodity fetishism conceals the relationships between people (or with animals) involved in the production of goods (workers and capitalist) behind the economic exchange of money and commodities: “It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things” (Marx 165). In “An Outpost of Progress”, when Makola exchanges tusks for the station men, he trespasses on what is acceptable by the white men because he replaces the usual trade goods which can be seen as an equivalent of money (beads and calico), and which seem to confine transactions to the exchange of objects, with human beings. He therefore reveals the true nature of the relationship between colonized and colonizer: it is not an exchange of material goods but slavery. As Elaine Freedgood puts it, “social relations hide in things” (Freedgood 54). And they can be read in things. In Heart of Darkness, the same idea is conveyed in a much less direct or explicit manner, when Marlow speaks of the “strings” of black workers, thus making a parallel with the (strings of) beads that serve for payment of the ivory – his way of underlining that the natives are turned into objects themselves.

• 11 Not to mention the fact that the dominoes were also called bones, a term which is highly evocative (...)

13So piano-keys at the Intended’s and dominoes on board the Nellie could look like details to mid-20^th century readers who read Heart of Darkness as a voyage into the self or a metaphysical quest (Hochschild 143). But the meaning of such details was much clearer for the late Victorian or Edwardian readers: their presence had to be re-inserted into the circuit of “exchange”, i.e. appropriation, transformation and distribution that guaranteed their availability on the European market. From that point of view, they were no longer details but the logical outcome of the ivory hunt in Africa, giving the attentive reader the key with which to understand why those who went out there behaved as they did.11 At the beginning of the novella, Marlow says that what redeems “[t]he conquest of the earth” is “the idea only” (Conrad 2006, 7, emphasis mine), but objects like the dominoes or piano-keys keep pointing at the material reality inseparable from the “idea”. The “horror” of colonialism may be only a rumour for the European readers, but the mention of such details functions like the return of the repressed and ensures that it remains grounded in reality.

• 12 Neither Marlow nor the frame narrator, who mention the piano-keys and dominoes, associate them with (...)

14As a consequence, their presence is perfectly necessary and logical. What they tell us is that the frame narrative is not only a frame but the place where everything starts and ends, not a place from which the crimes of colonialism can be judged but their cause. What they reveal is that there is no solution of continuity between Europe and Africa, as the comparison of the piano with a “sarcophagus” (Conrad 2006, 173) suggests: the victims of colonialization may be buried in Africa, but their ghosts have travelled to Brussels with the ivory or the money it returned. And it is all the more remarkable that Conrad chose objects like dominoes and piano-keys, not only because they were so trivial in a sitting-room or among a group of gentlemen trying to while away the time, but also because they are objects associated with leisure and culture, and telling us therefore that European culture is haunted by colonialism and its crimes, that it thrived on them while concealing its material (and highly unpalatable) aspects under a very civilized veil of refinement. Dominoes and piano keys make it possible for Conrad to go further than the denunciation of what takes place in Africa; they point at the other side of imperial domination. They associate Europeans who never took a direct part in colonization (but made use of the objects which were available thanks to it) to the process, revealing how the system of exploitation could go on since it safeguarded people’s clear conscience12 and concealed the material realities of colonialism behind the veil of culture. However, it also contaminated humans: not only Kurtz, out there, whose head had become an “ivory ball” (48) – a sign of his subjection to ivory fetishism –, but also the Intended who plays the piano, or Marlow’s friends who are allegedly interested only in navigation.

• 13 Confronted with the dying boy, he admits that “[he] found nothing else to do but to offer him one o (...)

15But objects do not only point at the circulation of goods between Africa and Europe and at the ethical and moral questions raised by colonialism, they also force us to pay attention to Conrad’s aesthetic strategies when dealing with what Marlow calls the “unspeakable”. In the “grove of death” passage, Marlow, just arrived at the first station, discovers the dying men. What he sees is so shocking that he can show it to us only at a remove, by transforming it, domesticating it. As Allan Simmons puts it, “Marlow’s narrative enacts the dilemma of representing ‘atrocity’ generally: what is the language to communicate that of which we can’t speak? Is there a ‘rhetoric of the unsayable’? […] the scale of the ‘horror’ to which it alludes cannot be adequately conveyed through facts […]” (Simmons 188-189). I would contend that if it cannot be “adequately conveyed through facts”, it is made sensible through details, through apparently insignificant objects. In order to speak of “that of which we can’t speak” and to protect himself from the trauma of the nightmarish encounter,13 Marlow’s solution is first to de-realise the scene in order to make it more acceptable for his listeners (and probably for Conrad’s readers as well): he therefore concentrates on the description of the men’s bodies, or rather on parts of their bodies seen separately, as if they were lifeless objects (bones, orbs of the eyes, fingers), like a painter who would try to make what stands before his eyes as precisely visible as possible – except that what he describes is anything but normal:

• 14 It is what F. Jameson reproaches Conrad with: concealing economic (or imperialist) realities behind (...)

16Such close-ups on body parts convey the dehumanization of these living corpses as well as Marlow’s shock: it seems that he can register the situation only progressively, one image after another. He needs familiar images to come to terms with such horrific visions: as a consequence, the sailor mentions ropes and their knots when he looks at their joints, or resorts to literary similes (“it seemed to me I had stepped into a gloomy circle of some Inferno”; Conrad 2006, 16). Above all, he presents the scene to his listeners as a painting or a print, describing the dying bodies with terms borrowed from the visual arts, as if he were technically commenting on a work of art: “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” (17, emphasis mine). At the end of the passage, Marlow explicitly associates what he sees with painting: “and all about others were scattered in every pose of contorted collapse, as in some picture of a massacre or a pestilence” (17). Conrad’s readers may have thought of Romantic pictures by Delacroix or Gros for instance. Here, Marlow does two things: speaking of “knots in a rope”, he de-realizes what is unbearable; and then he characterizes it as a “picture”, i.e. aestheticizes what he saw,14 domesticating it in order to make it acceptable, first to himself, and then to his listeners… and of course ultimately to the readers: the “horror” of the scene is finally contained by the pictorial reference; the material reality of tortured bodies is veiled by the aesthetic approach and yet, at the same time it becomes conspicuous thanks to this aestheticisation.

• 15 It can be noticed that this way of zooming in on “details” is a characteristic feature with Marlow. (...)
• 16 “Though our brother is on the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never (...)

20Marlow is obviously deeply shocked by what he sees in the grove of death. The piece of white worsted therefore gives him something he can rest his eyes on in this moment of extreme tension. But it also, and above all, works as the detail that “is poignant to [him]” and therefore “interrupts [his] reading”, redirecting his gaze and forcing him to acknowledge the man’s humanity: what the presence of the white worsted tells Marlow is that at one point in his life, the young man was an individual with a will of his own, who chose to put the piece of cloth around his neck. What the successive questions underline is that such a decision remains mysterious for Marlow, who cannot account for it but only make hypotheses, so that the detail transforms the meaning of the whole picture: the piece of cloth punctures the “picture”¹⁵, destroys its unity, forces Marlow (and the reader with him) to keep in mind that it is peopled by real human beings (not brushstrokes), and that the bones belong to living – or rather dying – bodies. The white worsted may be interpreted in many ways: as an image of the whites’ power over him, as a noose around his neck prefiguring his imminent death, etc. But Marlow sees it as an expression of the man’s choice, an ultimate manifestation of freedom in the midst of the dehumanizing process he is a victim of, a sign that he is still a human being. It brings back reality and its real atrocities into the picture. Focusing on the white worsted re-introduces a personal dimension, sympathy – and therefore the possibility of an ethical point of view. Adam Smith showed that sympathy is related to imagination and that emotions therefore have a moral value, as they encourage us to identify with others and empathize with them.16 This is exactly what happens here with Marlow: the white worsted “pricks” and “bruises” (Barthes 26) Marlow, forcing him to acknowledge the young man’s sufferings. As a consequence, sympathy reintroduces the possibility of an ethical point of view in a scene that is otherwise largely aestheticized.