Marlow and Inversion

“Marlow was not…

typical” (p2)

“He had […] an ascetic aspect, and, with his arms dropped, the…

palms of his hands outwards, resembled an idol.” (p4)

“he did not represent…

his class” (p4) 

“he had the pose of a Buddha preaching in European…

lothes and without a lotus-flower” (p6) 

how is he given to us?

• Sense that Marlow is somehow ‘other’ 🡪 he doesn’t fit into the British system of placing people

• Spiritual language used to describe him but significantly NOT language of Christianity 🡪 otherness and exoticism. 

• As though Marlow doesn’t fit into either world and is somehow trapped in an impossible ‘in-between’ space.

Marlow turns the established binary represented by…

‘light’ and ‘dark’ on its head.

Gives an account of history which mirrors that of the Narrator in reverse: that of “when…

the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago – the other day”. (p4) 

“We live in the flicker […] but…

darkness was here yesterday.” (p5)

Imagines the Roman ‘colonisers’ finding “Sand-banks, marshes…

forests, savages, - precious little to eat fit for a civilised man.” → Asyndetic listing mirrors that of the narrator but he has inverted ‘civilised’ and ‘savage’ to illustrate that there has been a time when we were colonised and we were the ‘savage’ to the ‘civilisation’ of the Roman invader. 

He asks his audience to imagine “a decent young citizen in a toga” arrive in England to “feel the…

savagery, the utter savagery […] all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs […] in the hearts of wild men.” (p5)

Marlow situates his tale just after he “had returned to…

London after a lot of Indian Ocean, Pacific, China Seas.” 

“I was loafing about, hindering you fellows in your work and invading your homes, just as though I had got a heavenly mission to civilise you.” (p7)

Although the tone here is light and humorous, the language still inverts the colonial equation, turning it around so that those on the boat listening to him are those being ‘invaded’ and ‘civilised’. 

He explains his childhood obsession with cartography and that he always had a yearning to go…

to Africa, which he describes as “the most blank”. 

ow that he is older, he appreciates that Africa is far more mapped and charted than it had been:

“it was not a blank space anymore […] it had become a place of darkness.” (p8) → Traditionally colonial exploration and ‘mapping’ of unexplored lands brings light to alleviate darkness. Marlow turns this on its head too so that mapping a place brings darkness. This is another of the ways he inverts the central symbols of light and dark!

The Congo he describes as “resembling an immense snake,” later concluding that “The snake had charmed me.” (p8) 

Snake charming is a very typical image of ‘exotic’ cultures (depicted on the cover of Orientalism). Inversion!