The limits of language in the heart of darknessFrom the beginning of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad traps us in a complex game of language, where eloquence is little more as a tool to mask horrible moral failings. Blurry and absurd descriptions, frame narratives and a surreal sense of Saussurean structural linguistics create distance from an always elusive center, to show that language is incapable of revealing the truth adequately or directly. Rather, understanding occurs in the margins and edges of the narrative; the meaning of a story “is not inside like a core but outside, enveloping the narrative that brought it out only as a glow brings out a mist” (105). The title of the novel is itself misleading, as Conrad deliberately takes us on a tour of understanding rather than directly to his heart, always hinting at something that, it seems, cannot be expressed. On his way to the "largest...emptiest space" on the map of his youth, Marlow reflects: "My isolation among all these men with whom I had no point of contact, the oily and languid sea , the dark uniform of the ocean. coast, seemed to distance me from the truth of things, in the labor of a lugubrious and senseless illusion” (108, 114). He repeats words until they are nothing more than sounds, polysyllabic mouthfuls devoid of real meaning: “palpable,” “priceless,” “impenetrable,” “impenetrable.” Thick layers of images pile up until all senses are shrouded in mist, darkness and distance. And yet, even in the face of the Unknowable, there is always a categorically declared sense of understanding, no matter how elusive or inadequate it may be. Marlow recalls that his experience in the Congo, for example, "seemed, somehow, to throw a sort of light on everything that concerned me – and in the middle of a paper… on the earth", according to the Saussurean linguistic theory that Conrad seems to support. "There was nothing above or below him," Marlow observes, "and I knew it...I didn't know whether I was on the ground or floating in the air." In his essay "The Failure of Imagination," James Guetti writes that in Heart of Darkness, language makes sense "in terms of the exterior of experience—the coast of a desert, the surface of a river, the appearance of a man and his voice - and meaning can exist as reality as long as we remain ignorant, deliberately or not, of everything that lies beyond these exteriors, of what language does not can penetrate. For with the indication that there is something beyond verbal, and even intellectual, capacities, comes the realization that language is a fiction” (SOURCE). This is perhaps the ultimate horror.