story he turns to stone, or not him entirely, just his heart. The man whose heart was figurative stone at the
outset has his heart turn to literal stone at the end. It’s perfect.
Or take the case of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. Early in the novel, Jim’s courage has failed him at a
crucial moment. His strength of heart, both in terms of bravery and of forming serious attachments, is in
question throughout the narrative, at least in his own mind, and at the end he misjudges an enemy and his
miscalculation causes the death of his best friend, who happens to be the son of the local chieftain. Jim
has promisedp. 211this leader, Doramin, that if his plan results in the death of any of his people, Jim will
forfeit his own life. When it does, he walks with great calm to Doramin, who shoots him through the
chest; Jim glances proudly at the assembled crowd—See, I am both brave and true to my word—and
falls dead. Conrad doesn’t perform a postmortem, but there is one and only one place in the chest where
a shot results in instantaneous death, and we know where that place is. The very next comment by
Marlow, the narrator, is that Jim was “inscrutable at heart.” The novel’s all about heart, really, heart in all
its senses. Jim’s end, then, like the Adamantine Man’s, is perfectly apt. A man who in life has put so
much stock in “heart”—in loyalty and trust, in courage and fidelity, in having a true heart—can only die
by a blow to the heart. Unlike Hawthorne’s character’s demise, though, Jim’s is also heartbreaking—to
the woman who is his de facto wife, to old Stein, the trader who sent him in-country, and to readers, who
come to hope for something heroic and uplifting, something suitably romantic, for the incorrigibly romantic
Jim. Conrad knows better, though: it’s tragedy, not epic, as he proves by that shot in the heart.
More commonly, though, heart trouble takes the form of heart disease. Vladimir Nabokov created one
of the nastiest villains in modern literature in Lolita ’s Humbert Humbert. His self-absorption and
obsession lead him to cruelty, statutory rape, murder, and the destruction of several lives. His darling
Dolores, the Lolita of the title, can never lead a psychologically or spiritually whole adult life. Of her two
seducers, Clare Quilty is dead and Humbert is in jail, where he dies, somewhat unexpectedly, of heart
failure. Throughout the whole novel he’s had a defective heart in the figurative sense, so how else could
he die? He may or may not need to die, but if he does buy the farm, there’s only one death symbolically
appropriate to his situation. Nobody had to tell that to Nabokov.
p. 212As a practical matter, then, we readers can play this two ways. If heart trouble shows up in a
novel or play, we start looking for its signification, and we usually don’t have to hunt too hard. The other
way around: if we see that characters have difficulties of the heart, we won’t be too surprised when
emotional trouble becomes the physical ailment and the cardiac episode appears.
Now, about that irony. Remember Florence and Edward, the wayward spouses with heart trouble? Just
what, you ask, is wrong with their hearts? Not a thing in the world. Physically, that is. Faithlessness,
selfishness, cruelty—those things are wrong, and ultimately those things kill them. But physically, their
hearts are completely sound. So why did I say earlier they suffer from heart disease? Haven’t I just
violated the principle of this chapter? Not really. Their choice of illness is quite telling: each of them elects
to employ a fragile heart as a device to deceive the respective spouse, to be able to construct an
elaborate personal fiction based on heart disease, to announce to the world that he or she suffers from a
“bad heart.” And in each case the lie is, on another level, absolutely true. As I said earlier, it doesn’t get
better than that.
24 –... And Rarely Just Illness
p. 213AT THE BEGINNINGof James Joyce’s wonderful story “The Sisters” (1914), the unnamed
young narrator mentions that his old friend and mentor, a priest, is dying. There is “no hope” for him this
time, we’re told. Already your reader’s radar should be on full alert. A priest with no hope? Not hard to
recognize in such a statement a host of possibilities for interpretive play, and indeed those possibilities are