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that welcomed fiction of a colourful medley nature. According to a spoof by Edgar Allan Poe, it preferred a style ‘elevated, diffusive, and interjectional’, where the ‘words must be all in a whirl, like a humming top…which answers remarkably well instead of meaning’. 12 Other readers have felt that the ‘whirling’ words of the story’s later part are signally important in emphasizing that the final horror assailing Marlow is grounded in his discovery that it is impossible to disclose a central core or an essence, even a firm basis for what Kurtz has done and what he is.
    In other words, Kurtz’s protean incarnations reflect upon the insufficiency of language to express anything more than a frustrated desire for meaning. That such extreme linguistic scepticism should appear in an apparently topical work about Africa is foreshadowed in Conrad’s comments upon a vitriolic attack on imperialism mounted by his friend R. B. Cunninghame Graham in ‘Bloody Niggers’ (1897): ‘There are no converts to ideas of honour, justice, pity, freedom. There are only people who…drive themselves into a frenzy with words, repeat them, shout them out, imagine they believe in them…And words fly away; and nothing remains, do you understand? Absolutely nothing, oh man of faith!’ ( Collected Letters , vol. II, p. 70). If, finally, the figure of Kurtz may be taken as a summarizing rubric for a larger free-wheeling medley of styles and genres, then one other implication tends to emerge: the quest for a presumed unity in the story may turn out to be less rewarding than one focusing upon the elisions, tensions and even collisions in its negotiation with shiftingly plural ‘hearts’ of darkness.
    IV
    It is hardly surprising that Heart of Darkness is often used to pursue an inquiry into the more general nature and practice of reading, and particularly into the perils and pitfalls of reading a Modernist text. The early part of the story offers a forewarning of challenges to come:
    The yarns of seamen have an effective simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But, as has been said, Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that, sometimes, are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. (6)
    While offering a familiar point of reference in Marlow’s incorrigible tendency to ‘yarn’, the description otherwise emphasizes an extreme version of the nebulous and penumbral–meaning inheres not in a glow, but as in a silhouette produced by a glow, which itself can be ‘spectral’. So pictorial is the analogy here that some readers have been prompted to make a link with, for example, the chromatic vibrations and atmospheric mistiness in paintings by the early nineteenth-century painter J. M. W. Turner, in whose works an ‘obscure’ revelation is effected by means of intermingled light and shade, or chiaroscuro (from the Italian chiaro or ‘clear’ + oscuro or ‘obscure’).
    The reference to a ‘misty halo’ serves as a reminder that a cognate image in the story is that of the veil, as in the opening description of the mist as being ‘like a gauzy and radiant fabric …draping the low shores in diaphanous folds’ (4), with its accompanying implication that moments of revelation only arrive when the veil is lifted or torn. It also anticipates the ways in which Marlow’s characteristic acts of seeing are so literally obstructed (the journey downriver in Part II finds him successively peering through darkness, impenetrable fog and then dark smoke from the steamer’s funnel) that he is allowed only glimpses of a ‘veiled’ kind. That the tale