It’s like describing mist in very precise terms, or depicting something as solid and tangible as a spear in terms which seem to make it melt into the air. In The English Novel: An Introduction, Terry Eagleton remarks that Conrad’s prose is both vivid or concrete and ambiguous or equivocal. Leavis, who was otherwise a great admirer of Conrad, remarked that Conrad often seemed ‘intent on making a virtue out of not knowing what he means.’ Certainly Conrad seems to enjoy uncertainty, obscurity – darkness, if you will, like the Heart of Darkness. Delayed decoding is one of the chief ways that Conrad goes about recreating the ‘presentness’ of Marlow’s experience, the sense of what it was like for him – surrounded by things he’s only half-figured out – as these things were happening to him. It’s as if it doesn’t trust the overly neat brand of hindsight which is offered by the traditional Victorian novel written in the perfect (past) tense. That is, it wants to recreate the immediacy of the experience, the way it felt for the character/narrator as it happened. Much modernist fiction may be written in the past tense, as Heart of Darkness is, but a good deal of modernist fiction is narrated as though it were written in the present tense. This has two effects: it brings us closer to Marlow’s own experience (we learn things as we go along, just as he did at the time), but it also makes us work harder as readers, since we are encouraged to appraise carefully everything we are told. He makes us wait until the point in the narrative when he found out his mistake before he corrects it. He – and we – later find out that it’s not written in code, but Russian. A good example is the moment when Marlow comes upon the abandoned hut in the jungle, and finds a strange book on the ground which contains notes pencilled in the margins which, he tells us, appear to be written in cipher, or code.

It’s as if you were there, and as confused and bewildered by it all as the narrator himself was.

Women in heart of darkness