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

The Limits of Language in marrow squash of DarknessFrom the very beginning of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad traps us in a complex play of language, where eloquence is myopic more than a tool to obscure horrific moral shortcomings. Hazy, idiotic descriptions, frame narratives, and a surreal sense of Saussurean structural linguistics clear distance from an ever-elusive center, to show that language is incapable of adequately or like a shot revealing truth. Understanding instead occurs in the margins and along the edges of the narrative the nub of a story is not inside like a middle but outside, enveloping 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 advisedly leads us around understanding rather than directly to its heart, always hinting at something that, it seems, cannot be expressed. En route to the biggest...most blank space on the stage of his youth, Marlow muses My isolation amongst t out ensemble these men with whom I had no point of contact, the soapy and languid sea, the uniform sombreness of the coast, seemed to keep me away from the truth of things, indoors the toil of a mournful and senseless delusion (108, 114). He repeats talking to until they are nothing but sounds, polysyllabic mouthfuls devoid of real mean palpable, inestimable, inscrutable, impenetrable. Thick layers of images accumulate until all senses are enshrouded in mist, darkness, and distance. And yet, even in the face of the Unknowable, there is still an adamantly declared sense of understanding, in time elusive or inadequate it may be. Marlow recalls that his lie with in the Congo, for example, seemed someways to throw a kind of light on everything about me and into ... ...ose of the earth, fit to the Saussurean linguistic theory 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 or 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 fathom 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 realisation that language is fiction (SOURCE). Perhaps this is the ultimate horror.