520
FREDERICK CREWS
brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions."
Now withered and helpless, and rescued by the narrator from "certain
midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites," Kurtz acknowledged
"the horror" of his experience and died, after which the narrator
found himself strangely interested in protecting the dead man's reputa–
tion - especially in the eyes of a marmoreal, mourning lady who
overrated him.
If
such a plot were recounted to a psychoanalyst as a dream
- and that is just what Marlow calls
it -
the interpretation would
be
beyond doubt. The exposed sinner at the heart of darkness would
be an image of the father, accused of sexual "rites" with the mother.
The dreamer is preoccupied with the primal scene, which he sym–
bolically interrupts. The journey into the maternal body is both
voyeuristic and incestuous, and the rescue of the father
is
more defiant
and supplantive than tender and restitutive. The closing episode with
the "phantom" woman in a sarcophagal setting would be the dreamer–
son's squaring of accounts with his dead mother. He "knows" that
parental sexuality
is
entirely the father's fault, and he has preserved
the maternal image untarnished by imagining that the father's partner
was not she but a savage woman, a personification of the distant
country's "colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life." But
given the anxiety generated by his fantasy of usurpation, he prefers
to suppress the father's misdeeds. Such a tactic reduces the threat of
punishment while reestablishing the "pure" mother-son dyad.
Only
one complaint against the sainted mother is allowed to reach expres–
sion: the son tells her with devious truthfulness that the dying sinner's
last word ("horror!") was "your name."
I do not want to review the abundant evidence that this "dream"
is indeed the shaping force in "Heart of Darkness"; this fact will
prove
if
anything too apparent to an unprejudiced reader who goes
over the story with attention to its language and the stages of its plot.
Derivatives of the primal scene await the hero everywhere: the African
bush swarms with "naked breasts, arms, legs, glaring eyes," "a black
and incomprehensible frenzy," "a great human passion let loose,"
"the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation" and
so
forth. In such surroundings the threat of castration from the two
classic sources, the father's wrath and the mother's body, is relentless;
