524
FREDERICK CREWS
ophy - treasured like Scripture by his critics - to plaster over his
confusion about the causes of his melancholy.
To a certain degree, then, "Heart of Darkness"
is
a clinical docu–
ment, a record of persisting misery. This is not to deny its power
as art but on the contrary to suggest where its power must lie. Despite
some details which owe their significance to memories that have not
been made available in the text, the anxiety of the whole story comes
across unmistakably. We do not yet have an aesthetics of anxiety - in–
deed, the New-Critical enterprise caIl: be construed as a skirting of the
problem, a defensive anchoring of emotion in "objective correlatives"
and self-referring tensions - but in reading a deeply logical work of
anxiety we seem willing to concede the suitability of its "adjectival"
and "vaporous" language to hidden referents.
If
we feel "Heart
of
Darkness" to be somehow coherent despite its patent vagueness and
its air of near hysteria, this is because a return of the repressed
is
not lost on us. We know it is right for Marlow, with his prurient
interest in his elders' misdeeds, to be drawn into a journey that leads
to knowledge of certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable
rites, and on the same level of awareness we know he must make
amends for having entertained such a revelation.
I doubt whether any biographical knowledge about "Heart of
Darkness" or any critical account of its logic will make its disguised
content too available for dramatic illusion to be sustained. Such
information only helps to explain why the story seizes us anew with
every reading. To say this, however, is not to say that Conrad's
sensibility is our own. Nihilism, which in Conrad is surreptitious and
nicely padded with scenic effects, has become aggressively explicit in
the serious literature of our day, and anyone who prefers Conrad's
mode is likely to be conscious of doing so nostalgically. The most
awesome and permanent Conradian secrets, the unseen magnets which
bind every detail in the field of
his
plots, are now matter for offhand
jokes: "I was on my way to my mother," says Beckett's Molloy,
"whose charity kept me dying." A contemporary writer could
be
forgiven for envying Conrad's relative ignorance, which enabled
him
to
be
earnest about fending off vice and to write stories that merge
self-realization with believable and intrinsically lively adventures.
Nothing is more symptomatic of the present predicament than that
Molloy, the man who is wholly at peace with his bodily self, should
