Why The Harlequin? (On Conrad's Heart of Darkness) [Volume: 3(1984), pp. 259-264]

WHY THE HARLEQUIN?
Josef Skvorecky
As most aspects of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the Russian harlequin
received a number of ingenious interpretations from readers who undertook
the "brave attempt to grapple with" the book's "fogginess." 1 Yet curiously
enough none seem to have commented on what, to anyone who knows
about Conrad's life, constitutes, I believe, the most natural explanation of
why this "improbable, inexplicable" 2 buffoon is in the novel, and what
purpose he serves there. True, two interpreters touch upon the significance
of the harlequin's nationality but they abandon this theme immediately and
offer explanations not based on its symptomatic importance for the author.
So C.F. Burgess, after admitting that the Russian "offers certain critical
difficulties (and) manages to baffle efforts to find a place and function for
him in the story," suggests that the presence-in 19th century Africaof a Russian adventurer has something to do with Conrad's ambivalent
feelings about the oppressors of his native country whose system of government caused the premature deaths of the writer's parents. After this,
however, Burgess proceeds to identify the Russian with the traditional Fool,
"the royal jester, the court buffoon," without taking into account what
was, perhaps, the most conspicuous prerogative of the medieval court
jester, namely to criticize, even make fun of the king: a prerogative otherwise granted to no one, most certainly not to Mr. Kurtz's buffoon.3 Mario
D'Avanzo explicitly draws attention to Conrad's biography and opines
that the choice of the Fool's nationality is an expression of resentment
which led to the "portrait of an imbecilic imperialist, the Russian Fool,"4
only to focus on the clown's many-colored attire and make a connection
between that and the many-colored map of Africa which Marlow views at
the beginning of the novel. The Harlequin, for D'Avanzo, becomes a
metaphor for African colonialism, undertaken by nations represented on
the maps by different colors which also shine on the Russian's patched
dress. The obvious question, why-since Russia at that time had no colonial
possessions in Africa-have a Russian symbolize European imperialism on
that continent, is not raised. Other interpreters, without examining the
puzzle of the Harlequin's nationality, see in him a "modern representative
of the European aborigine" whose roots go back to the satyr of the Greek
comedy who "always represented slaves," 5 or the figure of the "wild man
from Enkidu to Tarzan."6 One author, Harriet Gilliam,7 has devoted a
long and interesting study to "The Paleography of Russian Characters" in
259