by Wayne Spitzer

Created on: August 12, 2007   Last Updated: December 15, 2010

A Prayer Against the Darkness

Near the end of Richard Wright's novel, Native Son, a defense lawyer asks the accused murderer Bigger Thomas to observe the tall buildings outside.

"See those buildings, Bigger?" he says. "Faith holds those buildings up."

He is not talking about religious faith but the faith of reason: of Euclidean geometry and of structural engineering, the faith men have in their ability to defy gravity. It would seem, even, that this faith is justified, in the sense that men and women do, indeed, defy gravity, whether in an office building or a jumbo jet, every day.

But every structure must eventually collapse of its own weight; every jet engine must eventually be scuttled. This must of necessity qualify our definition of faith, lending to it an air of transience, of illusion, even delusion. We might rightly, then, without any judgments as to its nature (be it benevolent or benign), call faith a lie.

Marlow, the protagonist of Heart of Darkness, hates a lie. Indeed, we are hardly into the narrative before he tells us:

"You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavor of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget" (Conrad, 23).

Marlow especially detests the lie of European imperialism and self-importance. He is appalled by what he sees as a mean, vain, and ultimately impotent attempt to master the un-masterable - viewing it as an absurd conceit, effete and ineffectual, and personifying it as a "flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly" (13).

He stands aghast at the surreal incongruities he witnesses from the water: a French warship firing upon an unseen quarry may just as well be "firing into a continent: (11); a first-class agent of the Belgian Trading Company "jabbers on about himself" as the brooding wilderness looks on, "great, expectant, mute " (23); native workers, withered and emaciated from exposure and exhaustion, lie dying in the shadows while prim administrators "keep up appearances" - all for the acquisition of "a precious trickle of ivory" (15).

These incongruities stand in stark contrast to the context in which Marlow sees them; i.e., the Congo River and the impenetrable world beyond its banks. It is a world which is likely to cast a spell upon its inhabitants, a world inclined to whisper in one's ear, directing the listener to look

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