CONRAD
521
the landscape becomes a Freudian obstacle course. Let one example
suffice:
I avoided a vast artificial hole somebody had been digging on the
slope, the purpose of which I found it impossible to divine. It
wasn't a quarry or a sandpit, anyhow. It was just a hole.... Then
I nearly fell into a very narrow ravine, almost no more than a scar
in the hillside. I discovered that a lot of imported drainage-pipes
for the settlement had been tumbled in there. There wasn't one that
was not broken. It was a wanton smash-up. At last I got under the
trees. My purpose was to stroll into the shade for a moment; but
no sooner within than it seemed to me I had stepped into the
gloomy circle of some Inferno. . . .
To look at such a passage with comprehension of its plentiful sym–
bolic detail is to have removed oneself from Marlow's literal diffi–
cuIties; the text threatens to become no longer a story but a clinical
document.
Conrad specialists have yet to face this eventuality, but their re–
action can be predicted. Nothing is more repugnant to most literary
scholars than the thought that their favorite author was prey to
obscene wishes and worries. When simple incredulity does not dispel
the evidence, they attempt a more sophisticated accommodation:
"Freudian insights" are welcomed into the roomy mansion of criticism
to coexist peacefully with insights of every other sort. Each "mean–
ing" is taken as further testimony to the author's conscious art; if it
becomes necessary to recognize that, say, castration anxiety is a
feature of the text, then the author can be credited with a prescient
expose of
his
hero, who is now seen to lack masculinity
and
divine
grace. Thus the last and least sincere stand against mental strife is
a specious hyper-Freudianism which takes for granted a pre-Freudian
writer's conscious manipulation of psychoanalytic categories as if they
had been common knowledge all along. By means of such sophistry
an aloof, tastefully dehumanized notion of creativity can be upheld
while token deference is being paid to the irrational.
Perhaps, then, it is worthwhile to belabor the obvious point
that "Heart of Darkness" is in the most agitated sense an autobio–
graphical work. Far from criticizing Marlow, Conrad was using him
to recapitulate and try to master the Congo experience he himself had
sought out and undergone in 1890 - an experience that led not to
