The Blank Spaces of Heart of Darkness

Reflecting on her first experience of encountering Conrad, and decades of experience teaching Heart of Darkness, Cezair-Thompson (whose forthcoming novel is inspired by Conrad's novella) reads the "blank spaces" of Conrad's narrative in terms of the trauma of Marlow's experience: a trauma of witnessing that is unsettling in its own lack of empathy and provocative in the trans-cultural effects to which it bears witness. Attending to the silence of African voices in the novella, the essay dwells on the challenge of listening in the novel, presenting the Intended as the work's most important listener and potential co-witness.