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The Horror of Mimesis: "Enthusiastic Outbreak[s]" in Heart of Darkness Nidesh Lawtoo

Conradiana, Volume 42, Number 1-2, Spring/Summer 2010, pp. 45-74 (Article)

Published by Texas Tech University Press DOI: 10.1353/cnd.2010.0001

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cnd/summary/v042/42.1-2.lawtoo.html

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The Horror of Mimesis: “Enthusiastic Outbreak[s]” in Heart of Darkness N I D E S H L AW T O O

UNIVERSITY OF LAUSANNE

“It would be,” he said without taking notice of my irritation, “interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals on the spot, but . . .” “Are you an alienist?” I interrupted. “Every doctor should be—a little,” answered that original imperturbably. “I have a little theory which you Messieurs who go out there must help me to prove.” Joseph Conrad. Heart of Darkness

1. THE ALIENIST’S “LITTLE THEORY”

The Belgian doctor whom Charlie Marlow meets just before taking off to the heart of darkness is a minor, irrelevant character who tends to go unnoticed. Marlow even goes as far as calling him a “harmless fool” (Heart 15). And quite rightly so, since the “old doctor’s” interests in measuring his patients’ heads with a “thing like callipers” clearly shows that he follows, à la lettre [to the letter], the notorious craniological theory of Cesare Lombroso—an Italian jurist who considered that criminal tendencies were innate in individuals, and that criminals could be recognized by the shape of their heads (Heart 15).1 Yet, at the same time, this Frenchspeaking doctor seems to stray from Lombroso’s deterministic physiognomic theory. In fact, he affirms that “the changes take place inside,” making clear that his true interests do not concern anatomy, but psychology instead (Heart 15). And he adds: “it would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals on the spot” (Heart 15). What Conradiana, vol. 42, no. 1–2, 2010 © Texas Tech University Press

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the doctor says applies, of course, to his medical practice, so that as Marlow impatiently asks, “[a]re you an alienist?” he unequivocally answers, “every doctor should be—a little” (Heart 15). The actuality of this last statement in the medical field is, indeed, unquestionable; but cannot the same be said for humanistic disciplines like literary criticism and theory? After all, psychology has been a crucial component in literary studies for a while now, and often, literary characters have provided critical readers with interesting “cases” to solve. It is, thus, in this sense that I sympathize with the old alienist’s project. In a way, I even intend to continue, at the literary level, his psychological research. In fact, “I have a little theory, which you [Mesdames and] Messieurs who go out there [in that literary jungle which is Heart of Darkness] must help me to prove” (Heart 15). After the publication of Albert Guerard’s Conrad the Novelist in 1958—one of the earliest influential studies to explore the psychological dimension of Heart of Darkness—critics have often invoked the psychoanalytic notion of “identification” in order to define Marlow’s ambivalent relationship to his double, Mr. Kurtz. This point has been made so often that Conrad can now be referred to as “a novelist of identification” (Harpham 131). And indeed, the reference to an affect which troubles the distinction between “self” and “other(s)” seems particularly apt to for Conrad’s career-long fascination with the homo duplex [double human].2 And yet, Conrad himself already made clear that “[t]he homo duplex has, in [his] case, more than one meaning” (qtd. in Hay 32). In this paper, I suggest that Conrad’s interest in identification is but an instance of his more general engagement with what I call psychic or affective mimesis, a form of behavioral imitation whose primary characteristic consists in generating a psychological confusion between self and other(s) which, in turn, deprives subjects of their full rational presence to selfhood, of their capacity to think rationally, of their individual substance, as it were.3 At work in Conrad’s novella is, quite literally, an outbreak of such mimetic phenomena: somnambulism, comion, enthusiasm, emotional contagion, hypnosis, depersonalization and suggestion are all fundamentally mimetic, psychic tendencies that haunt the Conradian conception of the modern subject. What my “little theory” hopes to “prove” is that Heart of Darkness’s narrative struggle with colonial praxis and ideology is predicated on a confrontation with such a mimetic conception of the subject in its gendered, racial and political manifestations. It is well-known that Conrad’s novella posits a hierarchical distance between dominant and

L A W T O O — The Horror of Mimesis

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subordinate subjects and that, for Marlow, this distance is structured on the gendered and racial divide. In what follows, I argue that the sexism and racism at work in Heart of Darkness can only be fully understood against the background of the less visible, but fundamentally pervasive problematic of affective mimesis. Sexism turns out to be mimetic sexism, and racism mimetic racism. Furthermore, Marlow’s initial projection of mimetic affects onto gendered and racial others returns to haunt the dominant subject of Aufklärung [the Enlightenment subject]. Heart of Darkness challenges positivistic representations of subjectivity understood in of free-will, self-possession and rationality by showing how the dominant male subject of ideology is, quite literally, not a subject in possession of his thoughts (subjective genitive) but is dangerously possessed by mimetic affects instead (objective genitive). As we now turn to see, Conrad forces us to confront the process of ideological formation of the subject in childhood, its persistent psychic vulnerability to tyrannical leader figures in adulthood, as well as the ethical and political horrors that continue to ensue as the modern subject capitulates to the psychological power of mimesis. 2. MIMETIC SEXISM AND COLONIAL IDEOLOGY

This claim does not seem to apply directly to Conrad’s self-reliant hero. Already towards the beginning of his narrative, Marlow inserts a punctual, yet strategically reassuring remark about his normal self: “I always went my own road and on my own legs where I had a mind to go” (Heart 12). With such a concise formula, the narrator reassures his audience that he is a rational subject who is usually in control of his thoughts and actions. Marlow’s habitual self falls neatly within normative representations of masculinity. He offers a positivistic vision of the (male) subject understood in of free-will, self-control and intentionality—a kind of subject with whom istrative workers like his listeners (a lawyer, a director and an ant) can easily identify. As Henry Staten has convincingly argued, affirmations like this one are of rhetorical and strategic importance insofar as they “reaffir[m] within [Marlow’s] tale the manly bond that is the foundation of his listeners’ identificatory investment in the tale” (142). As long as the “legs” follow the “mind,” his male listeners are reassured that they are still within the boundary of a “manly” world of intentionality and rational clarity (Heart 12; Staten 142). To reinforce such a “manly” identificatory bond Marlow defines his

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version of masculinity over and against representations of femininity (Staten 142). Significantly, three of the five female characters present in the story crop up simultaneously in the initial pages of Marlow’s narrative. The Belgian women he encounters are also involved in the colonial istration; yet they are described in opposite from the male subject of Aufklärung [the Enlightenment subject]. Marlow’s characterization of femininity is, of course, not original. He clearly reproduces sexist stereotypical representations of women that were common in late nineteenth-century culture. For instance, Marlow encounters a “comionate secretary [. . .] full of desolation and sympathy” “with an air of taking an immense part in all [his] sorrows” (Heart 14). Comion is a moral quality whereby one suffers with the other; suffers as the other does; but of, course, in the context of Belgian colonialism, being comionate is a contradiction in —a contradiction suggesting that women’s so-called “over-emotional” tendencies blind their critical judgment. But comion is not the only affect Marlow invokes in order to distance his position from femininity. Moving to the sphere of psychopathology, he compares the other secretary’s behavior to a “somnambulist” (Heart 13): “[she] got up and walked straight at me—still knitting with downcast eyes—and only just as I began to think of getting out of her way, as you would for a somnambulist, stood still and looked up” (Heart 13). If the ironic reference to comion suggests the secretary’s ideological blindness, the comparison to somnambulism—a psychic pathology that was much discussed in the last decades of the nineteenth century—suggests a ive, mechanical and mindless subjugation to the colonial istration. In short, both somnambulism and comion are mimetic affects that dispossess these female subjects of their sobering rational control over themselves.4 Unlike Marlow’s feet, these women’s feet do not follow their mind, but the orders of the dominant colonial machinery instead. Marlow’s ironic distance with respect to women continues if we turn to consider the third case of mimetic femininity: i.e., the enthusiastic woman. Speaking of that “enthusiastic soul” who is his aunt, Marlow leaves no doubts as to her mimetic disposition: “There had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just about that time, and the excellent woman living right in the rush of all that humbug got carried off her feet. She talked about ‘weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways’” (Heart 12, 16). Conrad’s critique of colonialism is often inextricably intertwined with a critique of mass media, but in Heart of Darkness his attack concerns not only the newspapers’ ideological


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content but also the powerful impact of this medium on the psychic life of the readers—in this case, feminine readers.5According to Conrad, this new medium is responsible for an imitative psychic disposition that spreads contagiously across the masses of readers. This point was also made by social psychologists writing at the turn of the century who were beginning to for the psychological impact of mass media on to the public. The criminologist and social psychologist Gabriel Tarde, in L’opinion et la foule [The Opinion and the Crowd] (1901), extending Lombroso’s social concerns from physiognomy to psychology, explains this phenomenon in of “imitation” and does not hesitate to compare the psychic state of the reading public to “somnambulism” (Heart 13).6 For Tarde, the reassuring knowledge that news is shared, every morning, by the mass of other readers, powerfully endows such arbitrary beliefs with the quasi-religious status of truth and has the power to (dis)possess subjects of their ability to think critically. Similarly, Conrad implies that the hypocritical belief that colonialism entails “bringing light, and faith and commerce to the dark places of the earth” and at the same time, presumably out of a sheer comion, “weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways” affects, like a virus, the psychic lives of all of the public (Heart 16).7 Hence, the aunt, overwhelmed by the contagious power of “print” and “talk” feels rightfully entitled to define Marlow as “an emissary of light,” “a lower sort of apostle” —in short, as a modern savoir who has come to rid the world of evil (Heart 16, 15). We could then say that the “enthusiastic” aunt’s thoughts are, quite literally, not her own (Heart 12). Another speaks through her, namely the idol of colonial ideology. The aunt is, indeed, “enthusiastic” in the Platonic sense of the term (from Greek entousiazein, “to be possessed by a god”) (“Enthusiastic”).8 Knowing whether Conrad had read Plato or got the etymological meaning of “enthusiasm” second hand is not the point. Rather Marlow’s strategic use of “enthusiasm” to discredit his aunt’s rationality reenacts a fundamentally Platonic, anti-mimetic theoretical gesture, a gesture we shall repeatedly encounter as we continue to follow the mimetic undercurrent which connects Heart of Darkness’s multiple “enthusiastic outbreak[s]” (Heart 12, 37). Conrad’s awareness of the psychological implications inherent in the (Platonic) concept of enthusiasm should not come as a surprise. This notion is closely related to poetic inspiration, a phenomenon of daily concern for a writer, and its influence loomed large in the English Romantic and pre-Romantic literary tradition.9 Thus, if it is true that the aunt’s enthusiastic zeal for

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the colonial cause is closer to “religious zealots” and mimetic crowds than to inspired poets, it is equally true that psychologically speaking, both phenomena are clear manifestations of mimetic (dis)possession (Abrams 190). At this stage in the narrative, the critique of mimetic subjectivity we have barely begun to encounter does not concern every subject indiscriminately. Marlow, for one, remains critically alert with respect to the colonial ideology and praxis his aunt advocates. Thus, he not only affirms that her colonial idealism makes him “quite uncomfortable,” but he even opposes it on a solid materialistic ground, “ventur[ing] to hint that the Company was run for profit” (Heart 16). Men like Marlow, in other words, seem to be able to keep their critical distance from mediatized ideological suggestions, whereas “enthusiastic soul[s]” are hopelessly hypnotized by any kind of “sentimental pretense” they read in the papers (Heart 10). This, at least, is the psycho-political lesson the narrator draws from his meeting with women: he says to his male listeners: “It’s queer how out of touch with truth women are! They live in a world of their own [. . .] too beautiful altogether” (Heart 16). And he adds, “[s]ome confounded fact, we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation, would start up and knock the whole thing over” (Heart 16). Marlow’s rhetorical move is clear. Moving to a higher level of generality he contrasts women to men, relegating the former to the sphere of delusory fantasy while, at the same time, elevating the latter to a virile sphere of pure “facts” and “truth” (Heart 16). As Conrad swings the pendulum of Marlow’s narrative away from femininity we are clearly confronted with what Garret Steward defines as “Marlow’s often discussed view of women as cocooned dreamers whom a touch of reality would wilt” (371). Sexism, however, is not the only issue. At stake in Marlow’s complex attitude towards women is a tacit, yet fundamental difficulty in taking hold of a mimetic conception of the subject. Mimesis is, thus, not only disavowed but also projected onto gendered others. In fact, if we sum up his considerations on women as they appear condensed in less than four pages the following crude mimetic evaluation ensues (Heart 12–6). For Marlow, women are somnambulistic-comionate-enthusiastic creatures. As such, they are inevitably predisposed to easily get carried off their feet by all kinds of ideological “rot” that appears in print, while men’s feet and minds continue to diligently trade the path of “facts” and “truth” (Heart 15, 16). Marlow’s sexism, in short, should be qualified as mimetic sexism. And yet, if we place these considerations on gender in a wider


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textual topography, we begin to notice that Marlow’s narrative oscillation away from mimetic femininity is but a countermovement which attempts to compensate a previous oscillation towards both femininity and mimetic subjectivity. For instance, while defining himself over and against mimetic women, the narrator is fully aware that both his colonial adventure is predicated on the feminine/mimetic “world” he explicitly repudiates (Heart 16). “Then—would you believe it—I tried the women. I, Charlie Marlow, set the women to work—to get a job! Heavens! Well, you see, the notion drove me” (Heart 12). The tone as well as the rhetorical emphasis on disbelief that inform this age is clearly meant to solicit sympathy from his male audience and to preserve the boundaries of (male) group identification upon which the success of his narrative depends. Yet we cannot fail to notice a certain anxiety in Marlow’s voice— an anxiety which compels him to give linguistic substance to his feeling of selfhood (notice the string of personal signifiers “I, Charlie Marlow”) in opposition to the anonymous other (“women”) (Heart 12). This age makes clear that Marlow is painfully aware of his dependency on the feminine “world” he openly condemns (Heart 16). Moreover, Marlow’s ission that “the notion drove [him]” contrasts with his earlier emphasis on rationality, free will and intentionality (i.e., legs following the mind) (Heart 12). The masculine subject finds himself in a position of both grammatical and psychic ivity which resonates with the kind of mimetic suggestibility the narrator denounces in women. Despite the initial distance Marlow posits between women and men, suggestible and non-suggestible subjects, the subject of Aufklärung [the Enlightenment subject] and the subject of mimesis, such a distance is not as absolute as he would like to think. And not surprisingly so. In fact, Marlow’s own colonial adventure is rooted in a ive mimetic disposition which not only approximates but far exceeds his mimetic representation of women. Here is a thorough explanation of the psychic origins of his adventure: Now when I was a little chap I had a ion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia and lose myself in all the glories of exploration . . . I would put my finger on [an inviting space on a map] and say: When I grow up I will go there . . . True, by this time it was not a blank space any more . . . It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness. But there was in it one river, especially, a mighty big river that you could see on the map resembling an immense

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snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail lost in the depths of the land. And as I looked at the map of it in a shop—window it fascinated me as a snake would a bird—a silly little bird [. . .] [I] could not shake off the idea. The snake had charmed me. (Heart 11–12)

Marlow’s claim not be influenced by colonial “humbug” does not mean that he has always been immune to it (Heart 16). His childish “ion for maps” (the colonial instrument par excellence) is predicated on a mimetic affect that totally deprives him of his critical presence to selfhood (Heart 11). The trope of the “snake” and the “silly little bird” perfectly capture the state of psychic ivity and dispossession so characteristic of mimesis (Heart 12). Marlow is quite literally hypnotized and deprived of mastery over his feet and thoughts; and as he is in such a dreamy-hypnotic-mimetic state, he is, once again, affected by his childish dreams concerning the “glories of exploration” (Heart 11). Thus, as a child, he is literally compelled to turn this “white patch” into a mental landscape where he can “dream” and “lose” himself for hours (Heart 11, 12). To put it in Platonic language, a capitulation to the power of colonial suggestion has already taken place as Marlow was a “young and tender” creature who is “best molded and takes the impression that one wishes to stamp upon it”—the impression of a colonist as it were (Republic 624). With time, Marlow the “little chap” turns into a self-reliant “seaman” and “wanderer,” and the “white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over” turns into a “place of darkness” (Heart 9, 12). And yet, both the map’s hypnotic power and Marlow’s suggestibility to it remain essentially the same. In fact, the suggestive trope of the “snake” and the “charmed” “bird” unable to “shake off the idea” of colonial “exploration” (and the “glories” that go with it), do not apply to Marlow the “little chap” but, rather, to Marlow the adult “wanderer” walking in the streets of London, looking at “shop-window[s]” (Heart 11–12). Thus precisely as he glances at the map, Marlow re there was a “big concern, a Company for trade on that river” (Heart 12). The narrator, indeed, both (re-)incorporates and (re-)actualizes the colonial “dream” (or imperative) he first experienced as a child to “go there” (Heart 11). The theoretical insight implicit in this age is as clear as it is fundamental. Conrad is perfectly aware that the child’s initial psychic impressions, if invested with emotional energy, are extremely difficult to erase and, thus, continue to inform the psychic life of the adult subject. In short, the colonial ethos suggested to him in childhood in-forms in a permanent


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way his “character” (from Greek, kharassein, “to engrave, stamp”) (“Character”).10 At work in this age is a dense critical genealogy of the colonial subject of radical political import insofar as it traces the history of the colonizer’s subjection to the dominant ideology back to mimetic childhood. The affective repetition at work in this dense quote whereby an adult compulsorily reenacts a ionate attachment to the ideological object (i.e., maps) that fascinated him in his childhood unmercifully exposes the limits of the humanist notion of free-will and confirms the Conradian subject’s ive-malleable-hypnotic—that is, mimetic— status. Moreover, the fact that Conrad immediately places the subject in a socio-political field (i.e., a field which has the power to inform citizens by inducing in them the beliefs that dominate a given society) indicates that his critique of the subject does not stop at the psychological/ personal level but, rather, involves a political dimension. The radicalism of Conrad’s tacit critique of the subject of ideology stems from a dual realization. First, a hypnotic state of dispossession characterizes the dominant subject of ideology (i.e., his choices, values, and aspirations), and, thus, mimesis cannot easily be displaced on the side of femininity alone. Second, this psychic state of dispossession is far from being something extra-ordinary. As the “case of Marlow” suggests, it is instead such an ordinary everyday experience which, especially in childhood (though not only), can be triggered by any ideologically charged commodity—a map, in the old days was still enough to trigger a child’s enthusiastic imagination, now the same effect is achieved in an amplified manner through war toys and videogames. Conrad shows us that the male subject of ideology is not only the subject of Aufklärung [the Enlightenment subject] (alias the rational man) but also the subject of mimesis (alias the “silly little bird”) (Heart 12).11 If we now return to reevaluate critically Marlow’s considerations on gender, we notice that a countermovement swings him towards the mimetic conception of the subject he denounces in women. This second, more insidious, oscillation begins to undermine the distance to mimetic affects he previously set up. In fact, the “charmed” Marlow finds himself in a psychic position that not only approximates, but even exceeds the mimetic representations of women; his childish “dream” concerning the “glories of exploration” relegates him to what we could call, using his sexist language against him, “a world of [his] own [. . .] too beautiful altogether” (Heart 12, 11, 16). Moreover, Marlow’s “manly” colonialist project is not only compared to a childish fantasy but, more radically, is shown

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to be founded and motivated by a mimetic dispossession that took place in childhood (Staten 142). This age swings a representation of male subjectivity understood in of rational self-control towards a dangerous oeniric region of suggestibility, ivity, depersonalization and mimetic vulnerability. Conrad sets the pendulum of Marlow’s narrative in motion and begins to conjure the phantom of mimesis. Clearly Marlow’s psychology is not as stable as it first appears to be, insofar as the affective mimesis he tends to foreclose is inevitably constitutive of his own psychic life. What Jonathan Dollimore says of Heart of Darkness’s treatment of race is equally true of gender: “in the very process of defining itself over and against the primitive, the civilized is invaded by the other whose history and proximity it requires yet disavows” (148). And if Marlow’s take on femininity cannot be dissociated from his take on mimesis, the same thing can be said with respect to Marlow’s equally problematic take on race. As a result, I move from Marlow’s mimetic sexism to his mimetic racism. 3. RACIST RHETORIC / MIMETIC RHETORIC

Marlow’s understanding of racial differences in Part II is often predicated upon a violent hierarchy that is reminiscent of his earlier considerations on gender. In a notorious age, Marlow introduces a distinction between subjects who are in possession of themselves (white men) and subjects who are not (“prehistoric m[e]n”); and, once again, the notion of “enthusiasm” pops up in order to mark a difference between mimetic and non-mimetic subjects (Heart 37). Here is Marlow’s description of his encounter with an African tribe on the shores of the river Congo: a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us—who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. (Heart 37)

As with Marlow’s “enthusiastic” aunt, the Africans’ “enthusiastic outbreak” seems to deprive racial subjects of rational control over themselves (Heart 12, 37). Yet, the mimetic degree of such subjects is much


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more accentuated and acquires a bodily dimension which was lacking in the somnambulistic-comionate-enthusiastic Belgian women. If the aunt was part of a purely psychic mass (i.e. a public), the Africans are part of a physical mass (i.e., a crowd). Moreover, if the aunt was only metaphorically “carried off her feet,” the Africans are literally so (Heart 16). In fact, Conrad’s detailed physical description (“a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling”) makes strikingly clear that he has in mind a ritual dance endowed with the affective power to induce in its member a state of psychic (dis)possession (Heart 37). Such a state of “frenzy” as he calls it is, of course, well known, both in ancient and modern times (Heart 37). Plato calls it enthusiasm (534); Conrad calls it “enthusiastic outbreak” (Heart 37); modern anthropology calls it possession trance.12 Of course, while Marlow’s description clearly describes a mimetic phenomenon par excellence, his evaluation of it lacks the objective rigor of recent anthropological observations. In fact, Marlow’s anthropology, at this stage, is based on the naïve, because fundamentally ethnocentric idea that the mimetic subject is always the other. Accordingly, this description reinforces the violent hierarchy between “blackness” and “whiteness;” “savagery” and “civilization” (essentialist categories that modern anthropology has cast into crisis). Notice also that his theoretical premises fall neatly within nineteenth-century anthropology. The reference to “prehistoric man” is predicated upon the (at the time wildly accepted) evolutionary paradigm, whereby traveling in space involved a temporal return to prehistoric times: Marlow says that “[g]oing up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings” (Heart 35, 37).13 This theoretical move is instrumental in introducing a cultural, temporal, and biological distance between colonizers and colonized. Such a distance is also physical (they are “cut off” [Heart 37]) as well as moral (they are “appalled” [Heart 37]). The only way for Marlow to make sense of such a disconcerting mimetic phenomenon (that is, disconcerting for people educated in nineteenth-century Victorian England) is to relegate it to the “madhouse” (Heart 37). And yet, while contemptuously dismissing this state as a sort of mental pathology, Marlow’s pendulum begins to swing, tentatively, in the opposite direction. Well you know that was the worst of it—the suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped and

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spun and made horrid faces but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild ionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough, but if you were man enough you would it to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of the first ages—could comprehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. (Heart 37–8)

At stake in this age is a complex intertwinement of contradictory theoretical and rhetorical movements which we need to carefully disentangle. Marlow’s narrative oscillates madly, back and forth, between racist injunctions that dehumanize racial others on the one hand (“they howled, leaped, and spun and made horrid faces” [Heart 37]), and repeated attempts to nuance such racist distinctions in order to communicate the Africans’ human status (“their humanity—like yours” [Heart 38]). Marlow’s statements are, indeed, paradoxical. In fact, he seems intent in conveying both a feeling of distance and a feeling of proximity to racial others. Racism, in other words, is clearly part of his rhetoric, but so are his persistent attempts to establish a connection between his white listeners and the Africans; rational/non-mimetic subjects and enthusiastic/mimetic subjects. Unsurprisingly, over the past thirty years, critics have been arguing fiercely about the racist or non-racist aspect of these lines.14 The fundamental question is: what exactly motivates such contradictory, oscillating movements towards/away racial others? This age is not only about racism; it is also about mimesis. And a mimetic reading makes clear that at this stage in the narrative, Marlow not only uncritically displaces the mimetic conception of the subject on to subordinate others, but also begins to acknowledge that mimesis is constitutive of the modern subject of Aufklärung [the Enlightenment subject]. He now claims that a “kinship” exists between his listeners and the “wild and ionate” mimetic “uproar” the Africans give voice and body to (Heart 37). He also insists that at work in such an “enthusiastic outbreak” is a “meaning” that the modern “civilized” subject can still “comprehend” (Heart 38). Marlow supposes that his listeners can still “comprehend” mimetic affects because according to the nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropology he uncritically adopts, traces of “prehistoric” psychic life are still present in modern, “civilized” men: “The mind of man is


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capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future” (Heart 37, 38).15 The scientific validity of such hierarchical paradigms has long been disqualified. Anthropology cast the notion of racial superiority into disrepute as well as the notion of biological race. But is a mimetic conception as antiquated as a racist conception of the primitive, or are mimetic affects indifferent to arbitrary racial/racist distinctions? Despite its evolutionary bias, Heart of Darkness is very clear on this point. This age leaves no doubts as to Marlow’s primary concern: he is struggling to convey a feeling of proximity to mimetic, enthusiastic affects to his skeptical listeners on the Nellie—just as Conrad is doing with respect to his (skeptical?) readers. In short, both narrator and writer struggle to conjure the phantom of mimesis and to prove its uncanny actuality. Yet, this apparently linear project to bring mimesis back home, on the side of “modernity” and “civilization” as it were, entangles Marlow’s narrative in an impossibly paradoxical situation. He attempts to convey the mimetic status of the subject to his “civil” Victorian listeners via the example of the “prehistoric” enthusiastic Africans—i.e., those very subjects Marlow seems to repudiate on a racist ground (Heart 36, 37). A contradictory push-pull between racist and mimetic imperatives is thus at work in the narrative structure of this complex paragraph: if a racist conception of the subject introduced a distance, such distance is nonetheless immediately challenged by the mimetic affects that, according to Marlow, emotionally connect African and European subjects. In short, half of the story is about racism; yet the other half is about mimesis. Marlow’s dialectical narrative trajectory (i.e., affirmations of racial distance followed by a dialectical “but” which immediately negates distance and affirms a common mimesis) indicates that the emphasis is less on a disjunctive racial distance than on a conjunctive mimetic pathos (Heart 37). So much at the level of content. But what about the formal, rhetorical strategies Marlow uses to convey the mimetic status of the modern subject? Marlow finds himself in an extremely delicate narrative situation. In fact, his attempt to acknowledge the mimetic status of the modern subject via the example of the “enthusiastic” Africans in a state of “frenzy” threatens to disrupt the identificatory connection with his (racist) listeners (Heart 37). That Marlow is stretching such identificatory bonds too thin is exemplified by interruptions in the narrative like this one: “Who’s that grunting? You wonder I didn’t go ashore for a howl or a dance? Well, no—I didn’t” (Heart 38). Now, within this impossible narrative situation,

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Marlow’s offensive characterization of the Africans occupies a paradoxical rhetorical function. We have seen that racist injunctions like “the worst of it,” or “ugly” are obviously instrumental in introducing a distance between dominant and subordinate (Heart 37, 39); Europeans and Africans; the subject of Aufklärung [the Enlightenment subject] and the subject of mimesis. Less obvious, however, is the fact that such a racist distance is precisely what his listeners expect to hear. If we pay careful attention to the rhetorical dimension informing the narrative as a whole, it is not clear that these racist judgments stem directly from Marlow’s narrative perspective. In fact, Marlow’s narrative is not that uninterrupted monologue it is often thought to be but, rather, it is interactive and attuned to his readers’ emotional responses.16 Such affective interactions usually take place at moments of maximum tension between the content of Marlow’s tale and his listeners’ “civil” expectations. At such moments, Marlow tends to repeat, with indignation, the listeners’ intrusive ejaculations, ejaculations we, the readers, do not always get to hear: “Yes—I looked at them [i.e., the African cannibals] as you would any human being with a curiosity of their impulses [. . .] when brought to the test of an inexorable physical necessity. Restraint! What possible restraint?” (Heart 43). Or, “[a man] must meet that truth [i.e., mimetic truth] with his own true stuff—with his own inborn strengths. Principles? Principles won’t do” (Heart 38). And again: “Who’s that grunting? You wonder I didn’t go ashore for a howl or a dance? Well, no—I didn’t. Fine sentiments you say? Fine sentiments be hanged!”(Heart 38). Marlow’s rhetorical pattern indicates that words like “restraint,” “principles,” “fine sentiments” are, indeed, not originally his own (Heart 43, 38, 38). In fact, he simply restates, for rhetorical effect, what a listener has been saying. With this point in mind the following ages resonate quite differently: “[the earth] was unearthly and the men were . . . No they were not inhuman” (Heart 37). And again, “the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and ionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough, but [. . .]” (Heart 38, emphasis added). The rhetorical movements at work in Marlow’s voice seem to indicate that racist injunctions like the unvoiced “inhuman” and the voiced “ugly,” do not stem directly from the narrator, but from his listeners instead (Heart 37, 38). This point is crucial in order to understand the interactive, affective dimension of the narrative, and the rhetorical strategies that animates it, as well as to critically reevaluate Conrad’s problematic take on race.


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Marlow’s racist narrative moves, while in no way excusable, acquire a strategic rhetorical function. Namely, they reassure his audience that he is still one of them and, thus they are instrumental in maintaining the identificatory ties with his listeners—ties which are indeed necessary for a successful communication of the content of his tale. Hence, Marlow is now relying on this identificatory bond (predicated on a common racism) paradoxically to bring home the mimetic affects the Africans incorporate. His narrative is predicated on a communication of mimesis through mimesis, as it were. And yet, in order to do this, Marlow must, at the same time, constantly nuance his racist injunctions (if racial otherness is exaggerated, mimetic sameness cannot be conveyed). In other words, racism here functions both as a formal rhetorical strategy and as an impediment to the communication of the (mimetic) content of Marlow’s narrative. Structurally speaking, this age is predicated on a conjunctive-disjunction, a double-bind which swings Marlow’s narrative back and forth between contradictory poles. Precisely through this maddening oscillation the narrator desperately attempts to make his skeptical listeners recognize and acknowledge their affective vulnerability to such enthusiastic, mimetic outbreaks. But Marlow goes even further to bring mimesis back on the side of the cultural hegemony. Not satisfied with his racist rhetorical strategy, he equally recurs to masculinist rhetoric: he incites his listeners to be “at least [. . .] as much of a man as these on the shore” (Heart 38). And in a similar mood he adds: “if you were man enough you would it to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise” (Heart 38). Racist and macho rhetoric is here invoked to tickle the masculine pride of his listeners and challenge them to confront and acknowledge their vulnerability to mimetic affects—affects which lead the modern subject to respond to the “frankness of that noise” by “hands clapping,” “feet stamping,” “eyes rolling” etc. (Heart 38, 37). Clearly the heated controversy concerning racism and sexism in Heart of Darkness is heavily inflected by the less visible but more fundamental (in the sense that it informs both racism and sexism) problematic of mimesis. In fact, what we said of sexism can equally be said of the racism that informs this much-discussed age. Inherent in Marlow’s oscillating narrative is not only a projection of mimetic affects on racial/gendered others, but also an attempt to take hold of the mimetic conception of the subject he initially disavows. In short, Heart of Darkness

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insistently tells us that where there is racism and sexism lurks the disavowed phantom of mimesis—a phantom endowed with a kind of affective, rhythmic power to sweep not only women and Africans, but also white male colonialists, off their feet. For Marlow, then, it is important to stress the modern, rational subject’s proximity to mimetic affects. But why? Why is it so terribly important that his modern listeners acknowledge that they too, are still vulnerable to states of mimetic dispossession? Kimbrough’s Norton critical edition of Heart of Darkness gives us access to a manuscript age, which Conrad decided not to include in the final version of the text but helps us to answer what is, perhaps, the fundamental question at the heart of this text. The manuscript age makes clear on what empirical basis Conrad persists in thinking that modern subjects can still respond the “terrible frankness of that noise” as well as the ethico-political urgency to acknowledge the dangers of such a “response” (Heart 38): You know how it is when we hear the band of a regiment. A martial noise—and you pacific father, mild guardian of a domestic heart-stone suddenly find yourself thinking of carnage. The joy of killing—hey? Or did you never, when listening to another kind of music, did you never dream yourself capable of becoming a saint—if—if. Aha! Another noise, another appeal, another response. All true. All there—in you. (Heart 37–8)

In this instance, Conrad’s anthropology is, indeed, far from being naïve. In fact, Conrad anticipates contemporary definitions of this discipline as “translation of cultures”—i.e., a discipline which studies distant traditional societies in order to cast some light on the workings of the more familiar (and, thus, also less visible) modern societies (Asad 141). More precisely, this manuscript age shows that for Conrad, the “enthusiastic outbreak” in the jungle is not any different from a modern response to musical rhythm within a given social structure (in this case the army) (Heart 37).17 Hence, this example is clearly instrumental in displacing the mimetic-suggestible status of the modern subject from Africa to Europe, from blackness to whiteness, from a ritual dance in the middle of the jungle to a ritual march parading to the rhythm of a “martial noise” in the street of our own “monstrous town[s]” (Heart 37, 9). The ethical and political lesson being that modern man’s mimetic tendencies, for Conrad, are far more worrisome in Europe than in Africa. In fact, if some kind of music can provoke the noblest responses in modern subjects, other kinds can as easily end up in bloodshed. Practically speak-


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ing, if the Africans’ enthusiasm culminates in a ritual dance, the enthusiasms of “pacific father[s],” as they abandon their living rooms and newspaper in order to take part in official regiment marches or parades can potentially culminate in the “joy of killing” (Heart 38). Marlow/Conrad struggles to make his listeners/readers realize that mimetic dispossession should not be hastily displaced on racial/gendered others. For Conrad, the phantom of mimesis is haunting modern Europe makes it important for the dominant subject of Aufklärung [the Enlightenment subject] to acknowledge his own vulnerability to the power of mimesis. We can now better understand why, once back in Europe, Marlow says: “the commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of danger it is unable to comprehend” (Heart 70). Marlow, at the end of his considerations on the Africans’ “enthusiastic outbreak” says: “mine is the speech that cannot be silenced” (Heart 38). This voice attempts, with urgent insistence, to expose the modern subject’s vulnerability to forms of mimetic affects. It shows us that all kinds of mimetic responses are potentially there, in all of us, and forces both listeners and readers to take hold of the theoretical and political implications that ensue as the dominant subject of ideology gives way to the most horrific responses. 4. THE HORROR OF MODERNITY

As Marlow and his men follow the meandering course of that hypnotic snake which is the river Congo, the haunting presence of the phantom of mimesis progressively intensifies. As the narrative unfolds, mimetic affects not only appear in relation to gendered subjects (Part I), nor do they exclusively qualify racial subjects (Part II), but appear to characterize, with increasing insistence, that “troupe of mimes” (to borrow one of Marlow’s expressions) which are the white male colonizers (Part III) (Heart 55). A mimetic conception of the subject and all it entails—i.e., suggestibility to suggestion, hypnotic (dis)possession, psychic depersonalization, emotional contagion etc.—characterizes the “mental changes” (to borrow one of the old doctor’s expressions) of “enthusiastic” figures like the Harlequin, but also Marlow and, last but not least, that tyrannical leader figure who haunts the heart of darkness—Mister Kurtz (Heart 15, 37). The Harlequin embodies the most extreme version of the subject’s suggestibility, enthusiasm and mimetic depersonalization Marlow, and

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the listeners and readers with him, have encountered so far. The narrator first introduces him as a subject totally devoid of individuality, a “beardless boyish face [. . .] no features to speak of,” compares him to a “baby,” and he soon makes clear that this man without physical qualities is also deprived of all kinds of psychic qualities (Heart 53–4). In fact, Marlow adds that he lacked “all thought of self” and that “even when he was talking to you, you forgot that it was he—the man before your eyes—who had gone through these things” (Heart 55). The Harlequin, in other words, is a mimetic nobody who can assume the psychic form of everybody. He is a “be-patched youth,” a character of the commedia dell’arte [the Italian comedy] whose patched costume matches the fragmentation of his psychic life (Heart 55). Aptly linking the notion of enthusiasm with the one of mimesis, Marlow says “There he was before me in motley as though he had absconded from a troupe of mimes, enthusiastic, fabulous” (Heart 55). The Harlequin’s enthusiasm is primarily for Mr. Kurtz, and the mimetic bond that ties the former to the latter can be characterized as a relationship between the impersonal subject of the crowd and his hypnotic leader. “Kurtz’s last disciple,” as Marlow calls him, is filled with a sort of religious awe as he tentatively describes his colonial idol (Heart 58). “It was curious to see his mingled eagerness and reluctance to speak of Kurtz,” says Marlow, and he immediately adds, “[t]he man filled his life, occupied his thoughts, swayed his emotions” (Heart 56). The “fabulous” “irer of Mr. Kurtz” is not simply under the influence of another subject; he is, quite literally, possessed by that other in such a fundamental way that the distinction between his ego and the other’s ego, his life and the other’s life, no longer holds (Heart 58). This subject is but the “shadow” of another subject; his ego is but the “phantom” of another ego (Heart 58).18 Just as with his take on mimetic gender and mimetic race, Marlow’s attitude towards the Harlequin’s mimetic depersonalization is fundamentally ambivalent. While being clearly ironic throughout his entire portrayal of “Kurtz’s last disciple,” the narrator is equally forced to it that he “was seduced into something like iration—like envy” (Heart 58, 55). And he specifies, “I almost envied him the possession of this modest and clear flame. It seemed to have consumed all thought of self so completely that even when he was talking to you, you forgot that it was he—the man before your eyes—who had gone through these things” (Heart 55). Despite his ironic distance, Marlow is, indeed, drawn to this “flame” and the psychic consumption it entails (Heart 55). Such a


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psychic state of lack of critical presence to selfhood, Conrad warns us, has a fascinating, hypnotic drive—if only because, like sleep (or television) at the end of a hard day, it frees the modern subject of the burden of consciousness and the ethico-political responsibilities it entails. In short, even the critically vigilant, skeptical Marlow is fascinated by this state of mimetic depersonalization; he is drawn to it, in Conrad’s earlier trope, as a charmed “bird” is attracted to a “snake” (Heart 12). This time, Marlow manages to pull himself together and to retain enough lucidity to keep at bay from the Harlequin’s mimetic enthusiasm for Kurtz. Abruptly changing his tone of voice, he retrospectively comments: “I did not envy him his devotion to Kurtz, though. He had not mediated over it. It came to him and he accepted it with a sort of eager fatalism. I must say that to me it appeared about the most dangerous thing in every way he had come upon so far” (Heart 55). Nonmeditated “devotion” to a tyrannical leader and to the ideological flame he carries, Marlow now realizes, is “the most dangerous thing in every way,” as it deprives the subject of ideology of a rational ground to operate basic ethical and political choices (Heart 55). This point is confirmed by the case of the Harlequin, as he exclaims, in a desperate attempt to justify Kurtz’s atrocities: “‘You can’t judge Mr. Kurtz as you would an ordinary man. No, no, no!’” (Heart 56). Conrad’s hero, in contrast, is severely critical of Kurtz’s power and the horrors it generates. The fact that he “hadn’t heard any of these splendid monologues” helps him to proclaim that “Mr. Kurtz was no idol of [his]” and to sarcastically condemn his “less material aspirations” (Heart 58, 57). Moreover, by uncompromisingly affirming, “he is mad!,” Marlow relegates that “poor chap” to the madhouse (Heart 56). From the narrator’s distanced critical perspective, the sacrificial heads on the stake are not only food “for vultures” but also food for thought, an occasion to meditate on the horrific effects of mimetic affects (Heart 57). The conclusion of this meditation seems to be that midnight ritual dances manage to conjure not so much a terrifying god nor an idol but, as Marlow puts it, an “atrocious phantom,” the phantom of mimesis which possesses both Kurtz and his enthusiastic followers alike and deprives them of a basic moral sense (Heart 59). As Marlow severely puts it: “you may be [. . .] too dull even to know you are being assaulted by the powers of darkness” (Heart 50). Conrad, via the intermediary of Marlow, suggests that the darkness pervading his novella is primarily an ethico-political darkness which ensues from a psychic capitulation to the power of mimesis.19 Conrad

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moves from mimetic sexism and mimetic racism to mimetic politics. Towards the end of the novella, a journalist tells Marlow that “Kurtz’s proper sphere ought to have been politics, ‘on the popular side’” (Heart 72, 70). We are repeatedly told that this “eloquent phantom,” as Marlow also calls him, is endowed with a magnetic voice and rhetorical ability that dispossess subjects of their capacity to think rationally (Heart 75). Well before encountering Kurtz, the narrator says: “I had never imagined him as doing, you know, but as discoursing [. . .] The man presented himself as a voice”; and, as he finally meets Mr. Kurtz, his intuition is confirmed. “A voice! a voice! It was grave, profound, vibrating, while the man did not seem capable of a whisper” (Heart 48, 60). The essence of Kurtz’s being is not located in his actions, nor in his mind, or body, but in a voice that addresses other beings.20 Not surprisingly, this voice, as Marlow puts it, “wanted an audience” (Heart 55). Like other leader figures, Kurtz likes to test his power over the mimetic crowd. In Africa, where “[h]is ascendancy was extraordinary,” he addresses himself to what Marlow repeatedly calls a “wild mob” or, as he also puts it, “the wild crowd of obedient worshippers” (Heart 58, 66, 72).21 Kurtz’s power over the masses does not rely exclusively on the supposed naivety and mimeticism of the Africans (i.e., the mimetic racism we have denounced above). The mimetic Harlequin is, of course, part of the “wild crowd,” but even Conrad’s self-reliant hero is not immune to Kurt’s “magnificent eloquence” (Heart 72, 70). As Marlow puts it, Kurtz’s voice has “the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams,” and Marlow, feels entitled to say that “of all his gifts the one that stood out preeminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words—the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness” (Heart 65, 48). The heart of darkness and the phantom of mimesis are, once again, tightly strung together. And, once again, Marlow’s evaluation of this phantom oscillates between opposite poles. With one of his narrative voices, the narrator openly condemns the mimetic suggestion at work in Kurtz’s “gift of expression” in of the “most contemptible” “deceitful flow”—a flow that springs directly from “the heart of an impenetrable darkness” (Heart 48). And yet, another voice enthusiastically celebrates it as “illuminating” “pulsating stream of light” (Heart 48). For Marlow, Kurtz’s hypnotic rhetorical gifts entail an untidy intermixture of light and darkness, unbounded good and unrestrained evil: Marlow is both attracted and repelled by what he


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defines as “something altogether without a substance,” a “shadow [. . .] draped nobly in the folds of gorgeous eloquence” (Heart 48, 72). What is true of Kurtz’s oral gifts is equally true of his written skills. Speaking of the “report” Kurtz wrote for the “International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs,” Marlow critically notes that it was “too high-strung” and that the “opening paragraph—with its claim that [whites] must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings” which “in the light of later information, strikes [him], now as ominous” (Heart 50). As he retrospectively meditates on this report, Marlow the narrator can maintain a critical/ironic distance from Kurtz’s rhetorical pathos. Yet, at the moment Marlow the character first reads the “pamphlet,” his critical distance vacillates (Heart 50). In fact, after recognizing that “it was a beautiful piece of writing,” “eloquent, vibrating with eloquence,” he quotes a age of Kurtz’s “pamphlet” affirming that “ ‘[b]y the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,’ etc. etc.” (Heart 50). At this stage, Marlow confesses his capitulation to Kurtz’s “magic current of phrases”: “From that point he soared and took me with him [. . .] It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm” (Heart 51, 50). Why does Marlow enthusiastically accept an ideological position which he earlier vehemently denounced as non-meditated “devotion” (Harlequin) or “sentimental pretence” (women) (Heart 55, 10)? It is tempting to say that his capitulation to the phantom of mimesis is caused by being in the jungle, lacking what he calls a “solid pavement under [his] feet” and having “often a little fever” (Heart 49, 43). Yet Heart of Darkness does not allow for such easy pathological resolutions. The phantom of mimesis that Marlow’s narrative pendulum conjures clearly shows that for Conrad, the modern subject, with a temperature or without, is equally vulnerable to the “unbounded power of eloquence—of words—of burning noble words” (Heart 50). In fact, while Marlow consciously struggles to distance himself from such a mimetic dispossession and the horror that ensues from it, he nonetheless repeatedly avows his proximity and vulnerability to mimetic affects. His vulnerability is especially apparent as Marlow, at the “culminating point of [his] experience,” finally manages to directly confront the mimetic power of that charismatic leader Kurtz: an “atrocious phantom,” as Marlow aptly calls him, who, not unlike the snake of colonialism, “had the power to charm or frighten rudimentary souls” (Heart 11, 59, 51, my emphasis). The narrator adds, in a confessional tone: “he had conquered one soul in the

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world that was neither rudimentary nor tainted with self-seeking” (Heart 51). At stake in Marlow’s narrative is not only a personal avowal of his own suggestibility to Kurtz’s mimetic, rhetorical power, but also a realization of its political impact on the dominant body politic. Conrad’s narrative makes clear that the phantom of mimesis is indifferent to human, all too human, racial, gendered and cultural categorizations. In fact, this kind of “magnificent eloquence” does not only have the same effect on Marlow as on his aunt, but also equally affects European as it does Africans (Heart 70). Once back in Belgium, a journalist tells Marlow “Heavens! How that man could talk! He electrified large meetings [. . .] He would have been a splendid leader of an extreme party” (Heart 71). The leader figure may move around the world, but his electrifying or, as Plato would say, “magnetic” power, as well as the predisposition of crowds to be mesmerized by his mimetic power, remains fundamentally the same: whether “the magic current of phrases” appear in “print,” “talk,” “pamphlets,” speeches in the jungle or “at large meetings” in Europe, or any other dominant empire, they have the equal power to “electrify” subjects and dispossess them of rational control over themselves (Heart 50–51, 71). In short, the powers of darkness, and the horrors that ensue, cannot be dissociated from the threat of mimetic depersonalization. The phantom that haunts the heart of darkness is the phantom of mimesis; the horror, for Conrad, is the horror of mimesis. History, unfortunately, proved Conrad’s insights into the horrific results of mimetic behavior, prophetic. In the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s, mass media, martial parades and electrifying speeches soon stimulated the “joy of killing” in usually “pacific fathers” (Heart 37). In this sense, this text is prophetic of horrors yet to come and critiques in advance the totalitarian power of tyrannical leader figures. But are such leaders the only subjects responsible for the horror of mimesis? And can this horror be confined to fascism and Nazism? Heart of Darkness does not allow for such a reassuring resolution. In fact, the mimetic undercurrent I wish to make visible indirectly warns us that from a position of safe geographical and/or historical distance it is easy for modern readers to grunt at the idea that a proximity could potentially exist between ourselves and such extreme forms of horrific historical events. It is as easy for us to relegate such epidemic outbreaks of mimetic behavior to devastating historical situations as they appeared in Nazi as it is for Marlow’s listeners to relegate mimetic behavior to ladies’ drawingrooms, the African jungle or the madhouse.


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I not suggesting that Nazi, racial, and gendered others occupy an equivalent status. They obviously don’t. If the former were radically empowered criminal subjects the latter were (and in many places still are) victims, deprived of power. If the former’s mimeticism is there for all to see and to condemn in historical documentaries recording the martial parades Conrad foresees, the latter’s is, at least in part, the product of dominant projections and disavowals. I suggest instead that each epoch has its favorite mimetic others (whether fundamentally innocent or radically guilty) ready at hand in order to let them carry the common burden of mimesis. Deferring mimetic affects too hastily on to such scapegoats implies recurring to the naïve belief that the mimetic subject is always and only the other, or the enemy, and prevent us to think through our own implications in mimetic behavior and the horrors that directly, or indirectly, ensue. As Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe puts it “to say that the horror is ‘him,’ Kurtz, is to say that the horror is us” (231; my translation). It may be tempting to answer this point by referring to our “civil” status and the moral principles that sustain it. Yet, once again, Conrad does not offer such reassurance. Marlow responds uncompromisingly: “Principles? Principles won’t do. Acquisition, clothes, pretty rags—rags that would fly off at the first good shake” (Heart 38). Furthermore, Conrad’s critique of mimetic politics suggests that even the figure of the tyrannical leader is not a subject in control of the ideological position he promotes but is himself a victim of the power of mimesis. Not unlike the Harlequin, Mr. Kurtz, is not really a subject in control of his thoughts and actions. Kurtz’s suggestibility parallels the one of a most naïve child: “[h]e could get himself to believe anything— anything” (Heart 71). The charismatic leader appears paradoxically to be the most hapless victim of the power of suggestion. He is a “Shadow,” “something altogether without a substance,” an essentially void, selfless subject who is “hollow at the core” (Heart 65, 48, 58). The ordinary and the extraordinary man, the hypnotized and the hypnotist, the suggestible subject in the crowd and his leader, share a distinctive psychic feature: like children, they are both essentially the same in their mimetic depersonalization; in their suggestibility to suggestion. Finally, Conrad’s inquiry in the heart of the modern subject’s mimetic darkness suggests that we should not attempt to locate the power of mimesis exclusively in specific psychological “cases.” If Conrad fundamentally agrees that the phantom of mimesis takes possession of Mr. Kurtz, he equally reminds us that “all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz,” indicating that the leader is but the product of the

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larger dominant culture and ideology which informed him (Heart 50). Significantly, even at the moment of death, as Kurtz is uttering his last words, it is not clear whether he is the subject of discourse or simply an empty shell through which we hear the echo of the dominant massmediatized ideology. In fact, we are left to wonder with Marlow: “Was he rehearsing some speech in his sleep, or was it a fragment of a phrase of newspaper article?” (Heart 68). That the question is asked at all indicates that for Conrad the leaders’ opinions and dominant mass-opinion cannot easily be distinguished. Perhaps such a tyrannical leader figure does not possess political opinions to call his own: as Marlow asks “[w]hat party” Kurtz could preside, the visitor answer “‘[a]ny party [. . .]. [h]e was an extremist” (Heart 71). In this sense, Conrad asks whether the success of extremist leader figures relies on the reproduction of ideologically charged opinions that already inform modern subjects, subjects who live in what that insightful criminologist and social psychologist who is Gabriel Tarde, already in 1901, aptly called the “era of the public” (Opinion 38). In any case, if the Belgian alienist is right to stress that the “the changes take place inside,” Conrad also reminds us that the phantom of mimesis haunts not only at the heart of the psychic lives of subjects, but also the dominant mass-culture that is responsible for shaping massopinions in the first place (Heart 15). In short, this phantom is not only a psychological reality, but also a fundamentally political and ethical one. I hope I was able to catch at least a glimpse of Heart of Darkness’s untimely, mimetic lesson. Marlow’s oscillating narrative functions as a persistent effort to conjure the phantom of mimesis in front of his listeners, to make it visible and intelligible and, thus, to cast some light on the obscure process whereby mimetic affects have the power to dispossess and in-form the character of even the most rational of modern subjects. Moreover, Conrad reminds us that affective mimesis is responsible for the incorporation of dominant ideological imperatives, for putting them into praxis and for the horrors that all too often continue to ensue in our modern, mass-mediatized societies. According to Marlow, acknowledging the horrors of mimesis is already a “moral victory” (Heart 70). More moderately, it is perhaps the first step towards a critical evaluation of our own ideological beliefs.

NOTES 1. In L’uomo delinquente (1876), Lombroso postulates that physical, cranial deformities, testify to innate criminal tendencies in the subject, indicating ‘born


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criminals’ (Moscovici 73). On the relation between criminology and crowd psychology, see Moscovici 71. 2. For critics who argue that Marlow’s relationship to Kurtz is predicated on an identificatory tie, see Guerard 246, Harpham 128–31, Haugh 242, Roberts 130–6, Staten 142–8, and Steward 363–6. See Dodson on Conrad’s biographical entanglement in identificatory affects. 3. In a study currently underway titled The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism, Mimesis and the Pre-Freudian Unconscious I argue that “mimesis” does not entail simple “imitation” but, rather, a disconcerting psychological phenomenon that troubles the boundaries of individuation. My understanding of mimesis is indebted to the Platonic mimetic tradition, particularly as it emerges in the late nineteenth-century within the field of crowd psychology (Gabriel Tarde, Gustave Le Bon and, later, Sigmund Freud) and, more recently, among contemporary French theorists of subjectivity (René Girard, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen). 4. Somnambulism was tightly linked to hypnotic suggestion (i.e., a particularly extreme case of mimetic behavior) (see Bernheim 122). Charcot makes ‘somnambulism’ (after lethargy and catalepsy) the third stage of the hypnotic condition in hysteric patients (see, Bernheim 87–88). Gabriel Tarde claims that “in 1884 the notion of hypnotism had not yet been completely substituted by the one of somnambulism” (Lois 82 n3, 2). 5. In Conrad’s other Congo narrative, “An Outpost of Progress,” two male protagonists find some “old copies of a home paper” that “discussed what it was pleased to call ‘Our Colonial Expansion’ in high-flown language. It spoke much of the rights and duties civilization, of the sacredness of the civilizing work [. . .] bringing light, and faith and commerce to the dark places of the earth” (90). 6. Tarde argues that through an unconscious “imitation” opinions spread among that virtual mass which is the public and is eventually responsible for the latter’s “prodigious credulity,” a credulity which, in his view, is “reminiscent of the hypnotized” (Opinion 66). The power of mass media is not so much based on its content, but on the fact that masses of people are regularly and simultaneously exposed to the same opinions (See Tarde Lois xiv). 7. Borch-Jacobsen explains that “to say that ‘opinions’ and ‘sentiments’ are spread through the crowd by contagion is to say both that no of the crowd draw these opinions and sentiments from their own reserves, and that the crowd as a whole receives them from without, like a virus” (Freudian 139). 8. Plato’s psychological insights into the nature of mimetic affects appear in Book Three of Republic as well as in Ion where he defines the “enthusiastic” state of the rhapsode (a public reciter of poetry) as “inspired, possessed,” literally “carried out of [him]self,” his “soul” “in ecstasy” (533e, 535c). For Plato “enthusiasm” is the defining characteristic of the mimetic poet. The enthusiastic/mimetic poet, quite literally, does not know what he is saying since “the god himself who speaks” and that “the deity has bereft them of their senses and uses them as ministers” (534c–d). In short, the enthusiastic subject becomes merely a vehicle of the voice of the other; he is a ive subject who lacks critical self-control over his body and mind. Yet his enthusiastic state is contagious: the rhapsode communicates it to the public, as a magnetic stone transmits its magnetism to iron rings (see 533d).

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9. The eighteenth-century Scottish writer Alexander Gerard, in the Essay on Genius, wrote that in a state of “enthusiastic ardour,” “[imagination’s] motions became still more impetuous, till the mind is enraptured with the subject, exalted into extasy” (qtd. in Abrams 191). But in seventeenth-century England “[a]ny recourse to ‘enthusiasm’ [. . .] was dangerous, because it suggested the claim of disorderly religious zealots to have private access to God” (Abrams 190). 10. See Plato’s critique of psychic mimesis. As Socrates famously asks, “have you not observed that imitations, if continued from youth far into life settle down into habits and second nature in the body, the speech and the thought?” (640). Notice also that Conrad’s conceptualization of the child’s subjection to colonial ideology in of a ionate attachment to maps involves an articulation between political power and the psychic life of the subject, which resonates with Judith Butler’s Foucauldian/Althusserian insights into the process of subject formation. According to Butler, in fact, the “formation of primary ion in dependency renders the child vulnerable to subordination and exploitation” (Psychic 7). And she adds: “That vulnerability qualifies the subject as an exploitable kind of being” (Psychic 20). Plato, Conrad, and Butler agree on a fundamental point. Namely, they do not consider ideological power as simply exterior to the subject but, rather, inquire into the process of psychic incorporation of the Other into the self. Such psychic incorporation, in turn, is responsible for the fact that the subject experiences external ideological imperatives as its own; this subject considers itself as the subject of its discourse, life and choices while, in reality being subjected to power. The political, theoretical, and moral value of Heart of Darkness does not only consist in an exposure of the process of (ideological) subject formation, but also in delineating the potential catastrophic political consequences that ensue from this primary (and necessarily uncritical) mimetic subjection to ideological indoctrination. 11. Note that the reference to Marlow’s childhood precedes the references to mimetic women. Now, if we consider Marlow’s identificatory relationship with his listeners, the initial introduction of the category of mimetic childhood is of strategic importance. In fact, the listeners are very likely to recognize themselves (via identification) in the suggestible figure of the child. The introduction of the subsequent notions of enthusiasm, suggestibility and mimetic contagion, whether directly or indirectly, involves subjects with whom identification (for the listeners on the Nellie but also for Victorian readers) is much more problematic: in chronological order, the listeners are confronted with forms of enthusiasm pertaining to women, Africans, the Harlequin and, finally, Kurtz. Importantly, the possibility of the listeners and readers’ self-recognition in the mimetic status these figures represent seems radically dependent upon the initial identification with the mimetic status of children (a state every subject has experienced, and thus can identify with). 12. In Ion, Plato compares the state of the enthusiastic rhapsode to “the worshiping Corybantes,” [followers of the cult of Dionysius] who, “are not in their sense when they dance [. . .] [since] they are seized by the Bacchic transport and are possessed” (220). 13. For a contextualization of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in relation to Victorian evolutionary (or progressionist) anthropology, see Griffith 79–80.


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14. Achebe, as he considers these lines, repeatedly ends his discussion with Marlow’s affirmation “Ugly,” using this expression as a rhetorical trope to shift the emphasis in the ambivalent phrase “distant kinship” towards Conrad’s anxious need for distance (254, 257). C. P. Sarvan, however, stresses “continuity” and the “fundamental oneness of men and his nature” (283). See Mongia Pi ’s examination of the theoretical stakes of this debate,. 15. The typical nineteenth-century evolutionary model that informs Marlow’s considerations cuts both ways. On the one hand, the idea that the colonizers are traveling back in time, that geographical displacement parallels temporal displacement (traveling to “earliest beginnings of the world” [Heart 35]) involves a representation of so-called “primitive” cultures as cultures that temporally preceded (primitive from Latin primus, first) Western culture (“Primitive”). According to this antiquate perspective, the racial subject is totally other. On the other hand, according to this ethnocentric scheme, the nervous system of subjects who come “after,” is supposed to carry the traces of these “primitive” forms of behavior. Within this typically nineteenth-century (racist) evolutionary paradigm, mimetic behavior is what is inevitably found once the surface of civilization is scratched away. 16. For a lucid analysis of Marlow’s interaction with his listeners, see Staten pp. 143–152. 17. Once again, this Conradian insight is in line with Plato. In fact, in Republic 3, in the context of his condemnation of affective mimesis, a discussion of the dangerous, affective impact of music ensues. There Socrates says: “more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way to the inmost soul and take strongest hold upon it” (646). 18. The phantom of mimesis haunts the entire colonial enterprise. From the Belgian secretaries to the African colonialists, Marlow does not encounter egos, but merely phantoms. Thus he defines the Manager as a “papier-mâché Mephistopheles” with “nothing inside but a little loose dirt,” and Kurtz as “hollow at the core” (Heart 29, 58). If the former is part of what Marlow calls “mean and greedy phantoms,” the latter is described as an “atrocious phantom” (Heart 67, 59). 19. Lacoue-Labarthe stresses the power of the leader figure in his groundbreaking article “L’horreur occidentale” [“The Horror of the West”]. Lacoue-Labarthe’s focus is not explicitly on mimesis; yet he implicitly grounds his reading of Heart of Darkness in the disconcerting power of mimetic dispossession, what he calls “the horror of the absence of proper being” (Horreur 230). Such a horror, in his view, is characteristic of that “technique de la mort” [technique of death] which informs not only Kurtz’s power but all devastating forms of the “Western will to power” (234). Lacoue-Labarthe’s article appeared too late for me to fully incorporate it here, but I agree with his reading of “the horror” and I plan to return to it in another essay. I thank Hannes Opelz for bringing this article to my attention during one of our evening discussions at “The Punter,” in Cambridge. 20. In Chaplin’s classic The Dictator, Chaplin as Hinkel (a direct parody of Hitler), shows how the voice of the Führer acquires its full horrific power only when it addresses an audience. Baldwin’s recent comparison between Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Primo Levi’s holocaust novel, Se questo è un uomo [If This is a

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Man] is well taken. If Baldwin persuasively argues that Levi and Conrad share a common concern with “dehumanization,” a mimetic reading shows that Conrad’s concerns include such disconcerting psychic phenomena whereby charismatic leaders can take possession of entire masses of people via an identificatory process (185). In this sense, Conrad functions as a precursor of Holocaust literature, a precursor who perfectly understood—well before Freud’s analysis of the crowd’s identificatory relationship to its leader—the psychic, identificatory mechanism whereby a subject is rendered psychologically hollow by the mimetic power of a charismatic leader. On the political implications of the “toute puissance” [all-powerful] of Kurtz’s voice, see Lacoue-Labarthe 240. 21. Tarde and Le Bon were highly aware of the danger of crowds as were many nineteenth century novelists. Flaubert’s hero, in L’education sentimentale [Sentimental Education], is “caught by the magnetism of enthusiastic crowds” (qtd. in Moscovici 22); and Mauant affirmed “I have a horror of crowds” (qtd. in Moscovici 15). In Part III, Conrad multiplies references to the sociopsychological notion of “crowd”: Marlow speaks of a “motionless crowd of men of dark and glittering bronze,” “crowd of savages,” and of “the murmurs of the crowds [. . .] speaking from beyond the threshold of an eternal darkness” (Heart 59, 59, 74). This darkness extends beyond the Africans and Kurtz for Marlow describes London as a “gloom brooding over a crowd of men” and his own men as “an imbecile crowd down on the deck” (Heart 8, 67). For Conrad, the dark power of mimesis does not spare anybody.

WORKS CITED Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Kimbrough 251–262. Asad, Talal. “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology.” Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Eds. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1926. 141–64. Baldwin, Debra Romanick. “The Horror and the Human: The Politics of Dehumanization in Heart of Darkness.” Conradiana 37.3 (2006): 185–204. Bernheim, Hippolyte. Suggestive Therapeutics: A Treatise on the Nature and Uses of Hypnosis. Trans. Christian A. Herter. Westport, CT: Associated Booksellers, 1957. Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, Affect. Trans. Douglass Brick, Richard Miller, X. P. Callahan, and Angela Brewer. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. ———. The Freudian Subject. Trans. Catherine Porter. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.


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“Character.” Entry 2. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 7 Sept. 2010. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 3rd ed. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. ———. “An Outpost of Progress.” Tales of Unrest. Hammondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1977. 83–110. Dodson, Sandra. “‘A Troupe of Mimes’: Conrad, Casement and the Politics of Identification.” Conrad in Africa: New Essays on “Heart of Darkness.” Ed. Attie de Lange and Gail Fincham. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 107–128. “Enthusiastic.” Def. A1. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 7 Sept. 2010. Dollimore, Jonathan. Death and Desire in Western Culture. New York: Routledge, 1998. Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1959. Griffith, John, W. Joseph Conrad and the Anthropological Dilemma. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Guerard, Albert J. Conrad the Novelist. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958. Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. One of Us: The Mastery of Joseph Conrad. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Hay, Eloise K. The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Haugh, F. Robert. “Heart of Darkness: Problem for Critics.” Kimbrough 239–242. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. “L’horreur occidentale [The Horror of the West].” Lignes 22 (May 2007): 224–34. ———. L’imitation des modernes (Typographies 2) [The Imitation of the Moderns: Typography 2]. Paris: Galilée, 1986. ———. “Typographie [Typography].” Mimésis des Articulations [Mimesis, DisArticulations]. Ed. S. Agacinsky, J. Derrida, et al. Paris: Flammarion, 1975. 165–270. Le Bon, Gustave. Psychologie des foules [The Psychology of the Crowd]. Quadrige ed. Presses Universitaires de , 1995. Mongia, Pi. “The Rescue: Conrad, Achebe, and the Critics.” Conradiana 33.2 (2001): 153–63. Moscovici, Serge. The Age of the Crowd: A Historical treatise on Mass Psychology. Trans. J. C. Withehouse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Plato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books, 1963. “Primitive.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 7 Sept. 2010. Roberts, Andrew Michael. Conrad and Masculinity. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Ross, Stephen. “Desire in Heart of Darkness.” Conradiana 36: 1–2 (2004): 65–91. Rouget, Gilbert. Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations Between Music and Pos-

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session. Trans. Brunhilde Biebuyck. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Sarvan, C. P. “Racism and the Heart of Darkness.” Kimbrough 280–84. Staten, Henry. Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Steward, Garret. “Lying as Dying in Heart of Darkness.” Kimbrough 358–76. Tarde, Gabriel. Les lois de l’imitation [The Laws of Imitation]. Paris: Ed. Kimé, 1993. ———. L’opinion et la foule [The Opinion and the Crowd]. Paris: Presses Universitaires de , 1989. Chaplin, Charles, dir. The Great Dictator. Perf. Chaplin and Paulette Goddard. United Artists, 1940.

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