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The Limits of Language or Into the Heart of Darkness
By Meike Ziervogel
(This article appeared first in ‘In Other Words’ No 44 – The Journal for
Literary Translators, published by the British Centre for Literary Translation)
‘He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than
you do. Do you see him?’ asks Marlow his listener. Marlow is the protagonist
of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. He is a sailor, travelling up river on a
steamboat to the heart of the African continent in search of the infamous ivory
trader Kurtz. ‘I made the strange discovery that I had never imagined him as
doing, you know, but as discoursing,’ Marlow continues his description of
Kurtz a few pages later. ‘The point was in his being a gifted creature...his
ability to talk, his words – the gift of expression, the bewildering, the
illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating
stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable
darkness.’
So how does language define and delude Kurtz? Can language do good as
well as evil? And does Conrad deliver some linguistic conjuring tricks of his
own during the course of Heart of Darkness?
Let’s follow the course of Marlow’s steam boat.
‘We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past
like phantoms...We could not understand, because we were too far and could
not remember, because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those
ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign – and no memories.’
Words are symbols. We string them together to form language. And then we
use language to chop up reality into digestible bite-size packages in order to
be able to navigate our confusing world. If we don’t have language – or don’t
understand the language around us – life appears like a hostile, impenetrable
jungle.
Anyone who has ever lived in a foreign country with a different language
knows that feeling.
I came to Britain as a 19-year old. My English was not very good. But like
Marlow I was eager to set out on the steam boat that would take me up the
river of the new language and into the heart of the unknown country and
people. I learned fast. But after a few months something strange happened.
The better my English became the more an eerie silence and dead stillness
seemed to open up inside me. As cold and solid as the thick fog that Marlow
