Heart of Darkness: Preliminary Discussions

It seems that, in order to appreciate something like Heart of Darkness, it's necessary to absolutely ignore the conventional mentality where everyone feels like they have their own 'opinion' to contribute to a work, where everyone is so eager to share how they responded to a book. Indeed, Heart of Darkness is about a ruin, but one that is absolutely not to be understood in the traditional existential senses -- so that, in particular, Heart is not a ruin in the sense of a failure. Coordinating the above two thoughts, Heart of Darkness is about the ruin of modern society, but this ruin cannot be understood without thinking with the book, i.e. the definition is always at stake -- so that the 'about' must be understood strongly, as an evocation and a thinking of a highly particular sense of ruin.

The question of "What is ruin?" will guide our reading, but we must be clear as to the actual stakes involved (i.e. "keeping it real") -- for surely, in this question, we are not attempting to reach a definition of Conradian ruin. In order to outline the stakes of what we are attempting to do with this reading, why read at all, and why read philosophically in order to understand ruin, I must first of all describe the intimacy of ruin with the practice of reading. And authough this sounds like a preliminary discussion -- to lay out the stakes beforehand, before one applies this 'theory' to the historical object of the Heart -- we will find that we cannot talk about ruin and reading without referring to the book.

To read is to approach history. This assertion is counterintuitive when we realize that reading, for the most part, is understood today as an aesthetic or recreational activity -- perhaps not by default, but when we realize that reading cannot actually bring us in touch with reality. That is, all of us, having overcome the naivete of perception and representation, have nonetheless insisted on sticking with the notion of a 'mental image' or a 'mental effect' in thinking about reading. In other words, from a niave materiality (the opinions of the author, the images in the book, etc.) we have moved to a secondary, psychological reality or perhaps even a vulgar-technical reality (how I felt, how lighting was used, etc.). The reasoning thus runs: if a book cannot be pinned down and categorized, then the only reality a book can contact is the psychological reality, either expressed in psychological or technical-aesthetic terms.

What we are gambling, in our proposed reading, is in fact not something that extraordinary. We will ask Heart to be a characterization and a critique of our present age. Heart cannot be read, therefore, within the systems and the aesthetic/psychological impasses which characterize contemporary society -- in other words, we do not hope to arrive at a psychological understanding of our psychological age and its psychological readings. In other words, if Heart is about the present age, then it is not about the materiality and the mechanics of the present age -- or, it cannot be a demystification of the present age, a procedure which would continue to rely on psychological models.

To pause a breath for a minute here: the point of this post is to raise some preliminary questions about the stakes of our reading, yet our essay has been filled with mostly negative assertions. We recognize that Heart is about ruin, and that it is in fact about our ruin. But, being about our time, it is not of our time: it is not to be understood psychologically, experientially. We often forget that books were never considered paper equivalents of movies and reality until very recently -- for the longest stretches of history, it had a archival function. An archive makes no claims to immediacy, authough it does make some (debatable) claims about truth. And, basically, books continue to be treated in this way -- literary institutions are founded upon the archival nature of the book, the way it continues to bear truth, not as 'representation', but as, traditionally, 'spirit', 'ideology', 'culture', etc.

Heart, then, is an archive of the present age. More precisely, it is an archive of the age of empires, but that age continues to exist. As archive, it responds to the present age, yet (I assert) it cannot be read by the present age. I'm reminded of the way in which 80's movies seem to go out of style so quickly -- if seen on TV today, those movies appear as ruined works -- but they are ruined, apparently, in a very specific way, a way that we at present can apparently read. It's only possible to read ruined works (it's possible to respond to anything) -- thus, in 80's movies we confront a moment of readibility, when the emotional and psychological magic of the film has worn out and when the jagged peices of ideology seems to display themselves like a shattered pot. Hidden patterns that once ran through the text become apparent, theorizable, readable -- we read the shattered moral logics that were thought, at one point, to apply to all of humanity.

But, my point in bringing up 80's movies is, once again, to provide a foil to the ruin of the Heart of Darkness. We hear that literature is timeless -- yet, we argue (above) that only timeful literature can be read, or only 'quaint' and antiquated things can be read. When people say that great literature is timeless, they mean something entirely different from what is meant here when I say "not of this time", or without a time. "Timeless" in the sense of universal, enduring, eternal, must be differentiated from timeless in the sense of 'having no time', 'not having arrived': the former believes (foolishly, without any evidence at all) that the popular endurance of certain works of literature means that appeal in an aesthetic and obvious sense, that 'beauty' is eternal, and so on. Of course, we know that beauty is the most ephemeral thing of all, and not in a nostalgic and mournful sense, but rather in the sense that beauty is a kind of mystification that cannot withstand the test of time. That's why there are classes on art appreciation -- becaus these things don't come naturally or immediately, and that a certain understanding of history is required to rephenomenalize these works.

We have arrived, then, at the consideration of the particular nature of the ruin of Heart -- a special kind of ruin that renders the text, I argue, both readable and unreadable for these reasons: On the one hand, a work is readable only if it is in ruin, on the other hand, the ruin of Heart do not fit together like a once whole pot, but rather like a conspiracy -- something that seems to point elsewhere. In the ruin of Heart of Darkness, we recognize its readibility, its status as memory, as ideology, as temporary mystification. Yet, Heart resists the reconstruction, since it was never whole to begin with -- the ruin is to obvious, it is too apparent, Heart is about its own ruin.

Before we attempt to state all of this in forms which are a bit more precise, let's attempt to catch our breath. We began with the some observations about ruin, and about the relationship between reading and ruin. By reading, we mean here an intellectual analysis of the work and its history, and not an aesthetic enjoyment. We observe that the ruin of Heart is not ruined by time, of psychological change, but is a preexisting ruin ('about its ruin'). Our very ability to read, if it is founded upon ruin, upon reading ruins, is disrupted -- Heart is ruined by a process we have never encountered. Heart is therefore both readable and unreadable -- as ruin, as the ruin of history, it promises a reading, but as a ruin already, as something ruined by nothing (that we know of) it also denies this reading. We must attempt, at this point, to formulate some questions which our theorizing would be a response to.