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Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Ontology at the Heart of Darkness
Let’s recap. At the thematic center of Conrad’s novella we have a litany. It first appears in the long paragraph I’ve called The Nexus (paragraph 103), 1503 words long: “’My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my—‘ everything belonged to him.” It is repeated later on in paragraph 148, while the steamer is on its return trip with Kurtz on board: “My Intended, my station, my career, my ideas--these were the subjects for the occasional utterances of elevated sentiments.” Notice, FWIW, that while it is Kurtz who produces the phrase the first time it appears in the text – I assume that’s what Conrad meant by the single quotes – it is Marlow himself who produces it the second time.
If we take the two statements together, we have this list: (1) Intended, (2) ivory, (3) station, (4) river, (5) career, and (6) ideas, all prefaced, of course, with “my”. Ivory and river are physical things. But ivory is, in this usage, a formless substance, though any piece of ivory, such as a tusk, must necessarily have particular form. So is station in its use to designate Kurtz’s compound beside the river. But station could conceivably be abstract as well, where it could mean his position within the company, which is a matter of some discussion here and there in the story, or his station in life more generally. Those things are positions in a network of social relationships and, as such, are rather more abstract. Career and ideas are both abstract, with ideas being possibly more abstract than career.
As for the Intended, that is a person. People are physical things, of course, like ivory tusks, or rivers. But they are living things and so they have . . . what? Classically they have souls, with plants having vegetative souls, animals having (additionally) sensitive souls, and humans having (additionally) rational souls – think of Aristotle, De Anima, and of the Great Chain of Being. Within that list the Intended is the “link” between ivory and ideas, as it were. She is a physical thing, like ivory, and, as the possessor of a rational soul, is capable of having ideas.
That’s a list then, that implies a whole world in a more differentiated way than the “everything” that appears in the first telling of the list. That list is an ontology or at least implies one by virtue of the fact that its members span various ontological categories. It’s what the object-oriented ontologists call a Latour Litany. Rhetorically, it’s a gesture that implies the world.
But let’s get back to the Intended, who has first position in both tellings of the list, as though it all flowed from her. In the first place, she is simply “the Intended,” she has no name. Other than Marlow and Kurtz, no one in this story is named, at least not that I recall. Nor are the river or African country named. It’s a very abstracted tale, as though it were only about types, not specific people, places and things.
And the Intended, of course, is a type. Think of Dante’s Beatrice. A specific person to be sure, but since Dante never interacted with her, never had an actual relationship with her, her specifics didn’t matter. She was simply the Beloved. And if the Intended, the Beloved, is psychologically derived from the Mother, a various lines of thought would have it, both past and contemporary (see my previous post, where I talk of Bowlby and attachment*), then this figure is, in the logic of myth, the logic of the unconscious, effectively outside time and space. She is the occasion of the force that binds everything together into a world.
Alas, in Heart of Darkness, Kurtz has lost his way. It seems that the Intended’s people didn’t approve of him: “He wasn’t rich enough or something. And indeed I don’t know whether he had not been a pauper all his life. He had given me some reason to infer that it was his impatience of comparative poverty that drove him out there.” One he’d slipped the bonds of civilization, his desire no longer had a proper object. And so it sought the world and imploded on itself.
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*See also the Wikipedia article on attachment, and the work of Phillip Shaver, who has worked on extending attachment theory to adult romantic relationships.