The Limits of Language in Heart of Darkness Essay -- Literary Analysis

The Limits of Language in Heart of DarknessFrom the very beginning of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad traps us in a complex play of linguistic communication, where eloquence is little more than a tool to obscure horrific moral shortcomings. Hazy, absurd descriptions, frame narratives, and a surreal sense of Saussurean structural linguistics create distance from an ever-elusive center, to fork bulge that run-in is incapable of adequately or directly revealing truth. taste instead occurs in the margins and along the edges of the narrative the meaning of a write up is not inside like a kernel but outside, enclose the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze (105).The title of the novel is itself misleading, because Conrad purposely leads us well-nigh understanding rather than directly to its heart, always hinting at something that, it seems, slewnot be expressed. En route to the biggest...most blank space on the map of his youth, Marlow muses My isolation amon gst entirely these men with whom I had no point of contact, the oily and languid sea, the same sombreness of the coast, seemed to keep me away from the truth of things, within the toil of a mournful and senseless delusion (108, 114). He repeats words until they are aught but sounds, polysyllabic mouthfuls devoid of real meaning palpable, inestimable, inscrutable, impenetrable. Thick layers of images cache until all senses are enshrouded in mist, darkness, and distance. And yet, even in the face of the Unknowable, on that point is still an adamantly declared sense of understanding, however elusive or inadequate it may be. Marlow recalls that his experience in the Congo, for example, seemed somehow to throw a kind of light on everything about me and into ... ...ose of the earth, according to the Saussurean linguistic guess that Conrad seems to support. There was nothing either above or below him, Marlow observes, and I knew it... I did not know whether I stood on the ground o r floated in the air. In his essay, The Failure of the Imagination, James Guetti writes that in Heart of Darkness, language has meaning in terms of the exterior of experience the coast of a wilderness, the surface of a river, a mans appearance and his voice and the meaning can exist as a reality so long as one remains ignorant, deliberately or otherwise, of all that lies beyond these exteriors, of what language cannot penetrate. For with the intimation that there is something beyond verbal, and indeed, intellectual capacities, comes the realization that language is metaphor (SOURCE). Perhaps this is the ultimate horror.