Things that Happen in the Dark: Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, and Emmanuel Levinas on the Self and the Other

Abstract

This essay compares Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) in terms of the phenomenological and metaphysical relationship of the self with the other. I begin by investigating parallel moments in each text that probe the nature of darkness and alterity. I develop these examples through the work of French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, whose description of the il y a (literally “there is”) opens up the conversation’s broader possibilities. I then juxtapose Kurtz’s famous expression of “horror” to Forster’s “ou-boum” echo in the Marabar caves and liken each to Levinas’ primordial “rustling”, the sound of the universe without individuation. The two novels converge, I argue, in their use of darkness as a metaphor for the disruption of the autonomous self represented by the encounter with the other.