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PARTISAN REVIEW
cannibalism as the body is cut up for purposes of assimil a tion . But this
is not the body, not the " thing itself, " but clothing, the man-made
container for the thing itself. Note that throughout the story Hermann
is associated with clothes, just as Falk is nearly always described in
terms of his body presence and posture.
Connected to this is their different relationships to language:
Hermann is verbose, voluble, h ysteri cal, an over-user of wo rd s; Falk is
invariabl y silent, even when he has to talk he is made to seem almost
nonlingual (hi s speech h as no inflexions, and he speaks without
emphases). This of course is why he is drawn to the young niece in the
way tha t he is. She too is described as pure magnifi cent body, with a
constant stress on volume, mass, and so on; and she is utterly silent as
well as apparentl y nameless, as though having no traffi c with lan–
guage. She too is the thing itself. Language, categories, conta iners,
coverings, clo thes - o bviou sly I am sugges ting th at these are deliber–
a tely interconnected in this story. Set over aga inst them is the bod y,
man 's corpo real , "corporate exi stence. " This phrase brings in the sense
not onl y of the individua l human body (the "skin-bound o rgani sm")
but a lso of a body of men who form some kind of fun ctioning group
which bes tows on them their social as opposed to their ph ys ica l
identity (cultu ra ll y-interrela ted organi sms). T hu s one o f Conrad 's
main con cerns is, wha t is it tha t ho lds man / men together bo th
phys ica ll y and sociall y? And by fixing on the literal act o f cannibalism
Conrad can explore in a parti cul a rl y powerful way wha t happens
when es tabli shed ways of holding man / men together " break down ."
T he idea of, or word for , cannibalism recurs frequentl y in Conrad ,
from
N igger of the Narcissus,
in which Singl eton is dignified by a
comparison with a cannibal chief, to
The Secret A gent
in which Stevi e
is fragmented into "what might have been an accumul a tion of raw
ma teri al for a cannibal feas t," blown to bits by a metaphor careless ly
dropped earlier in the book. But more important of course is Conrad 's
use of cannibals in
H eart of Darkness.
They are of course admirable
figures in that story. " Fine fellows-cannibals-in their place. They
were men one could work with ."
In
additi on they are victimized and
deprived on the three levels I have mentioned . They are virtua ll y
w ithout food , thus suffering on the biological level; they are shame–
less ly exploited economically-the white men throw their food over–
board becau se it smells rotten and give them pieces o f brass as a
substitute currency; and they are out of their own language and culture
on the ship , so tha t their pa rticular concepts and cultural ritua ls a re
neither understood nor allowed to opera te. The amazing thing to
