Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)

Tibor Tóth: Conrad's 'Secret Garden'

darkness"

1

0 seem to disclose the heart of the matter. The heart of light, the Garden of Eden becomes the heart of darkness that is hell. No wonder Marlow remarks "I felt as though, instead of going to the centre of the continent, I were about to set off for the centre of the earth."

1

1 In spite of this comprehensive picture, Marlow insists on revisiting the Garden of Eden, which he only dreamt of in his childhood. The whispers he can hear from the secret garden tempt him to open the gate, and, as if in a spiritual coma, he can hear those voices although the garden is filled with the breath of death and it offers a sublimes view of misery and greed. The meaning of the words dies, and the religious overtones are persistently subverted by the rival discourse already noted: the 'merry dance of death and trade"

1

2 becomes the spiritual destination formulated by this discourse. Adjectives gain more power, conferring a mystical quality to concrete imagery unfolding through the journey and practically blocking interpretation as the "implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention."

1

3 F. R. Leavis is mistaken when he writes that Conrad tries : to impose on his readers and on himself

... a "significance" that is merely an emotional insistence on the presence of what he can't produce. ... [an] insistence [that] betrays the absence, the willed "intensity," the nullity. He is intent on making a virtue out of not knowing what he means. Conrad is actually making a virtue of showing that no meaning can be attached to a world suspended between belief and disbelief. Through the two clearly distinguishable discourses Conrad shows the impossibility of the modern man's dream to reinstate the Biblical world parallel to his insistence on the attempt to return to that primary state of wholeness. The search for the moral meanings, and truth of human existence through progression and regression, through the thanatic and the erotic desire are revealed as non-definable. The metaphysical paradox is complemented by the physical paradox and 1

0 Heart of Darkness, 52 1' Heart of Darkness

, 60 1

2 Heart of Darkness, 62 1

3 Heart of Darkness, 92-93 1

4 Leavis, F. R. : The Great Tradition

, London: Chato & Windus, 1979, 180 158