Writing About Violence in a Secular Age: Conrad's Solution

Twentieth-century writers have repeatedly claimed that the violent events of their time were not only unimaginable but inexpressible. At the turn of the century, Joseph Conrad introduced the trope of the indescribable "nightmare" in Heart of Darkness to convey Marlow's experience of colonialism in Africa (Conrad 2006, 69). James Joyce used the same metaphor in Ulysses for Stephen's refusal to accept a role in Ireland's ongoing religious and nationalist conflicts: "History. . . is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" (Joyce 1986, 28). After the First World War, T. S. Eliot blamed the difficulty of "making the modern world possible for art" on "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history" (Eliot 1975, 178, 177). A generation later, Theodor Adorno declared that writing poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric (Adorno 1967, 34). Although these expressions of rhetorical impotence imply that recent events were worse than any in the past, the historical record of heinous acts is long and vicious. Atrocities were not new, but never before had they threatened to reduce witnesses to silence. Twentieth-century political violence was unprecedented not because it was worse but because it occurred in a secular culture. In the past, communal beliefs had justified or condemned the most horrific acts, but the late nineteenth-century crisis of belief made any consensus about the meaning of violence unattainable.This situation produced an aesthetic dilemma, because to represent violence is to give it a meaning. A dead body does not explain itself, and the narrative of the suicide bomber is not the story of the child killed in the blast. Derek Walcott conveys the scope of this problem in his 1962 poem "A Far Cry from Africa":Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:"Waste no compassion on these separate dead!"Statistics justify and scholars seizeThe salients of colonial policy.What is that to the white child hacked in bed?To savages, expendable as Jews? (Walcott 1986, 17)The speaker expresses his ethical stance negatively: only a worm could be indifferent to the "separate dead," whether the victim is white or black, African or European. Yet this conviction conflicts with the most basic attempt to represent violence by counting the dead: 'Statistics justify.' If even raw numbers insert victims into a tendentious discourse, how can violence be made known?One answer for modernists was symbolism, and Heart of Darkness became a prototype for writing about atrocities. Conrad represents Marlow's "nightmare" by attaching symbolic meanings to realistic accounts of historical events. This solution, however, has become the target of scathing ethical and political protests, notably those of Chinua Achebe and Fredric Jameson. Turning to Roman Jakobson's structural definition of symbolism, we can begin to understand why so many twentieth-century writers found symbolism useful, as well as the reasons that so many critics have objected to it. Jakobson graphs language on a horizontal axis of syntax and a vertical axis of semantics (Jakobson and Halle 1956, 60). He compares syntax to the figure of metonymy because both are based on contiguity, and he associates semantics with metaphor because both depend on substitution in a given position (78). Extending this model to literary forms, Jakobson argues that realism, which refers to observable reality, is metonymic, and symbolism, which can evoke referents beyond sensory experience, is metaphoric.1 Just as every sentence operates on both the syntactic axis and the semantic axis, every text has realistic and symbolic significance.Jakobson's linguistic model clarifies the relation between realism and symbolism in Heart of Darkness. The specificity of realism represents acts of colonial violence, and the multiple meanings of symbolism frustrate attempts to explain it. Marlow's first words illustrate how symbolism constructs meaning by making the incomprehensible events of the present part of a pattern: "'And this also,' said Marlow suddenly, 'has been one of the dark places of the earth'" (2006, 5). …