LISTENERS AND LIES IN ‘HEART OF DARKNESS’

Abstract

IN Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness', the effect of speakers on listeners is obviously an important aspect of characterization, but even more important, thematically, is the power of listeners over speakers. To be successful, a speaker must accommodate his audience. This is why the first rule of rhetoric is 'know your audience'. When Flaubert, for example, struggles for le mot juste-which is the word that will have the right effect on his readers-to some degree he is making himself the instrument of his readers. It is always so: the audience seems passively receptive, but, by the very act of listening, the audience largely determines what it will hear. The active influence of listeners on speakers has been a matter of inference in literature from Othello through the dramatic monologues of Browning, but in 'Heart of Darkness' it comes close to being the main theme. Conrad's novel is largely a dramatic monologue whose primary speakers, Marlow and Kurtz, resemble each other in their extraordinary passivity before auditors in private and public discourse. The chief focus of this shared rhetorical disposition is Kurtz's fiancee, the principal listener whom Marlow and Kurtz have in common. As such, she is even more important to the meaning of the novel than she is generally considered to be. In 'Heart of Darkness' the reciprocity between listeners and speakers results, as many critics have noticed, in an extraordinary number of lies. The motif of lying within Marlow's story has important implications for its narration because the speaker who tells the most lies-and he admits to most of them-is Marlow. This tendency to lie, in a narrator who says he detests lying, undermines the trustworthiness of his narration. Since he speaks freely, even impulsively, to his audience aboard the yacht, we are inclined to trust the factual elements of his narrative, which is, after all, partly a confession of