The discourses of Heart of Darkness

Abstract

Let us now look at the discourses that define the Subject-positions for Kurtz. The force of the retrospective narration, Marlow’s use of memory to tell a story, has the effect of filling the text with voices from the past. It lingers on as a ‘dying vibration of one immense jabber’ [HD, p. 69]. There is an obsessive insistence on the voices he remembers; indeed, he is often fascinated — a key word for Marlow. He is especially fascinated by Kurtz’s most memorable quality: his eloquence. He continues to hear the echo of Kurtz talking; and ‘other voices — all of them were so little more than voices — even the girl herself — now —’ [HD, p. 69]. He also remembers most vividly what was being said about Kurtz. We could say that the substance of Marlow’s text is a report of sorts, a collection of opinions about Kurtz. The chief accountant, the brickmaker, the manager, the Russian, and the Intended; but also a journalist colleague and a cousin of Kurtz back in the sepulchral city after his death — they all have things to say about him. One other voice makes a crucial contribution to the construction of Kurtz: the manager’s boy announces his death (with the words which now have intertextual resonance through the epigraph to T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men, 1925): ‘Mistah Kurtz — he dead’ [HD, p. 100].