Intertwined Traumas: Narrative and Testimony in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Abstract

ABSTRACT That Heart of Darkness continues to generate multiple critical responses owes to a large extent to the text's endemic ambivalence. Conrad's tendency to remain inconclusive, what Harold Bloom calls his ‘unique propensity for ambiguity'1, has received a great deal of critical attention, and its ideological and moral foundations have been thoroughly analysed. However, the possibility that the text's indeterminacies may have their origins in the psychological conflicts of its central narrator has not been sufficiently addressed. This paper draws upon Cathy Caruth's pioneering work on trauma and testimony, to argue that the fragmentation in Marlow's narrative is the result of a psychological crisis that is caused not by direct exposure to violence, but by witnessing someone else's trauma. Having come into contact with Kurtz's disturbing story, Marlow steps in the position of the confused listener, and his story becomes the fragmentary account of a traumatised subject. By shifting attention from the shocking events of the novella to the narrator's predicament as he attempts to bear witness to Kurtz's trauma, one would begin to address another enigmatic aspect of the trauma in the text – how the encounter with someone’s psychic wound can lead to the traumatisation of the witness.