Strange experiment, Heart of Darkness: sending a clear-sighted bourgeois engineer to witness the fact that one of the most profitable ventures of fin-de-siècle capitalism was the opposite of industrial efficiency: ‘the opposite of what was modern’, to quote Schwarz one more time. ‘Acquisition by force’ survived side by side with modern rationality, I wrote a few pages ago, and Conrad’s novella—where the ethical bourgeois is sent to rescue the irrational adventurer—is the perfect example of that jarring cohabitation. Surrounded by a crowd with whom he has nothing in common, Marlow’s only moment of empathy is with an anonymous pamphlet he finds in an abandoned station along the river; ‘humble pages’, he writes, made ‘luminous’ by their ‘honest concern for the right way of going to work’. The right way: work ethic, in the midst of colonial pillage. ‘Luminous’, versus the ‘darkness’ of the title: religious associations, like those of the ‘calling’ in The Protestant Ethic, or that initial ‘ devotion to efficiency’, which has its own Weberian echo in the ‘devotion to the task’ of ‘Science as a Profession’. But . . . devotion to efficiency—in the Congo Free State? Nothing in common, I said, between Marlow and the plunderers around him: nothing in common, that is, except for the fact that he works for them. The greater his devotion to efficiency, the easier their looting.
The creation of a culture of work has been, arguably, the greatest symbolic achievement of the bourgeoisie as a class: the useful, the division of labour, ‘industry’, efficiency, the ‘calling’, the ‘seriousness’ of the next chapter—all these, and more, bear witness to the enormous significance acquired by what used to be merely a hard necessity or a brutal duty; that Max Weber could use exactly the same concepts to describe manual labour (in The Protestant Ethic) and great science (in ‘Science as a Profession’) is itself a further, indirect sign of the new symbolic value of bourgeois work. But when Marlow’s wholehearted devotion to his task turns into the instrument of bloody oppression—a fact so patent, in Heart of Darkness, as to be almost invisible—the fundamental antinomy of bourgeois work comes to the surface: the same self-referential absorption that is the source of its greatness—unknown tribes hiding ashore, foolish and frightened murderers on board, and Marlow, oblivious to all, keeping the steamer on course—is the source of its servitude, too. Marlow’s work ethic impels him to do his work well; to what end, is not its concern. Like the ‘blinders’ so memorably evoked in ‘Science as a Profession’, the legitimacy and productivity of modern work are not just intensified, but established by their blindness to what lies around it. It is truly, as Weber writes in The Protestant Ethic, an ‘irrational sort of life . . . where a man exists for the sake of his business, instead of the reverse’, and where the only result of one’s ceaseless activity is ‘the irrational sense of having done his job well’.56
An irrational sort of life, that dominated by Zweckrationalität. But instrumental reason, as we have seen, is also one of the underlying principles of modern prose. In a few pages, the consequences of this association will become visible.
Christian asceticism, we read in The Protestant Ethic,
had already ruled the world which it had renounced from the monastery and through the Church. But it had, on the whole, left the naturally spontaneous character of daily life in the world untouched. Now it strode into the market-place of life, slammed the door of the monastery behind it, and undertook to penetrate just that daily routine of life with its methodicalness, to fashion it into a life in the world, but neither of nor for this world.57
A life in the world, but neither of nor for the world. Just like Robinson’s life: ‘in’ the island, but neither ‘of’ nor ‘for’ the island. And yet, we never have the impression that he ‘gets nothing out of [his activity] except the irrational sense of having done his job well’, as Weber writes of the capitalist ethos.58 There is a subdued, elusive sense of enjoyment that pervades the novel—and that is probably one reason for its success. But enjoyment of what?
Earlier on, I quoted the moment when Robinson addresses the reader—‘this will testify for me that I was not idle’—in the tone of one who is justifying himself in front of a judge. But then, the sentence veers in an unexpected direction: . . . that I was not idle, and that I spared no pains to bring to pass whatever appeared necessary for my comfortable support’.59 Comfortable: this is the key. If the ‘useful’ had transformed the island into a workshop, ‘comfort’ restores an element of pleasure to Robinson’s existence; under its sign, even The Protestant Ethic finds a lighter moment:
Worldly Protestant asceticism acted powerfully against the spontaneous enjoyment of possessions; it restricted consumption, especially of luxuries . . . On the other hand . . . it did not wish to impose mortification on the man of wealth, but the use of his means for necessary and practical things. The idea of comfort [in English in the original] characteristically limits the extent of ethically permissible expenditures. It is naturally no accident that the development of a manner of living consistent with that idea may be observed earliest and most clearly among the most consistent representatives of this whole attitude towards life. Over against the glitter and ostentation of feudal magnificence which, resting on an unsound economic basis, prefers a sordid elegance to a sober simplicity, they set the clean and solid comfort [Bequemlichkeit] of the middle-class home [bürgerlichen ‘home’] as an ideal.60
The bourgeois home—the English bourgeois home—as the embodiment of comfort. In the course of the eighteenth century, writes Charles Morazé in Les bourgeois conquerants, ‘England made fashionable a new type of happiness—that of being at home: the English call it “comfort”, and so will the rest of the world.’61 Needless to say, there is no ‘middle-class home’ on Robinson’s island; but when he resolves to make ‘such necessary things as I found I most wanted, particularly a chair and a table; for without these I was not able to enjoy the few comforts I had in the world’,62 or when he later declares that ‘my habitation grew comfortable to me beyond measure’,63 he, too, is clearly identifying comfort with the domestic horizon: a chair, a table, a pipe, a notebook . . . an umbrella!64
Comfort. The origin of the word is in a late Latin compound—cum + forte—that first appears in English in the thirteenth century, to indicate ‘strengthening; encouragement . . . aid, succour’ (OED), and whose semantic sphere remains more or less the same for another four centuries: ‘physical refreshment or sustenance’, ‘relief’, ‘aid in want, pain, sickness . . . mental distress or affliction’. Then, in the late seventeenth century, the sea-change: comfort is no longer what returns us to a ‘normal’ state from adverse circumstances, but what takes normality as its starting point and pursues well-being as an end in itself, independently of any mishap: ‘a thing that produces or ministers to enjoyment and content (usually, plural, distinguished from necessaries on the one hand, and from luxuries on the other)’.65
Necessaries on one side, and luxuries on the other. Caught between such powerful concepts,