N a r r a t i v e1 1 1yet they refuse to give up on it all the same, and it is this refusal that
keeps storytelling in business. One is always nearer by not standing
still. Marlow speaks in Heart of Darkness of travelling to ‘the
farthest point of navigation and the culminating point of my expe-
rience’. The only question is whether, having arrived at this stark
extremity, one has the courage like Kurtz to peer over the edge into
the abyss. Kurtz has journeyed beyond language and narrative into
an obscene reality far beyond their frontiers; and this is presented
by the story as a kind of horrific triumph. He has stared the
Medusa’s head in the face without flinching, and this, perhaps, is a
more admirable achievement than suburban middle- class virtue. It
is a familiar modernist case, as audacious as it is dangerous.
This, at least, is what Marlow himself believes about Kurtz, a
man who hardly makes an appearance in the book. But he might
always be falsely idealising him. Conrad himself may have other
opinions. Some of his other works, like Lord Jim and Nostromo, are
equally shy of telling a story straight. Instead, their accounts loop
back on themselves, start off halfway through, run several storylines
at the same time, exchange one narrator for another or recount the
same events from different standpoints. The reader is forced to
slice into the story at one angle and then another, skating backward
and forward in time and relying on someone’s record of someone’s
account of someone else’s report.
Some of this is reminiscent of one of the greatest of English
comic masterpieces, the eighteenth- century author Laurence
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Garbling one’s storytelling is not confined
to modernism. Sterne’s novel is really a narrative about the impos-
sibility of narrative, at least of a realist kind. What it has seen is that
realism, strictly speaking, is beyond our power. No piece of writing
can simply tell it as it is. All so- called realism is an angled, edited