The ‘saving lie’ and the saving truth

Introduction: The issue

In the gathering darkness on the boat in the Thames estuary, Captain Marlow relates his long journey up the Congo, into the interior of the Belgian Congo in search of the elusive Mr Kurtz. As he penetrates further and further into the interior of the country, the darkness of mystery seems to deepen. What he finds out about Kurtz, is rumour and hearsay, with only a little fact to base his impressions on. He sees evidence of his malpractice, but the charismatic, eloquent Kurtz is clearly able to evoke intense loyalty and affection. When Marlow eventually meets him shortly before Kurtz dies, he is also in thrall to the man’s charisma, and his loyalty to Kurtz is ensured when he hears the latter in his dying words admit honestly to the evil in himself and achieve self-knowledge with the whispered words ‘ “The horror! The horror!” ’ ¹

The narrative form of Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness, written in 1902, has ensured that we never fully know and understand Kurtz. The first narrator, Conrad, knows that the company on the yacht is about to hear one of Marlow’s ‘inconclusive experiences’ (p. 32). We hear other people’s opinions and praise of Kurtz, and their statements of loyalty. Marlow wraps himself up in so many words that truth is obscured in surmise and hyperbole. He is sucked into the mesh of evil and lies that he has earlier in his account vowed never to espouse when he says: ‘You know I hate, detest and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies …’ (p. 57) We will consider the final enigmatic, inconclusive scene of the novella, the meeting with Kurtz’s ‘intended’, which casts light into the darkness of his effect on Marlow, the latter’s descent into compromise with the truth, and attempt to justify Marlow’s response to the ‘intended’s’ reaction to his words. We consider also whether truth is an absolute value or relative to Marlow’s predicament.

Marlow describes Kurtz’s final whispered admission as ‘an affirmation, a moral victory, paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions’ (p. 113). Yet as he visits the ‘intended’, Marlow recalls with disgust Kurtz’s ‘abject pleading, his abject threats, the colossal scale of his vile desires, the meanness, the torment, the tempestuous anguish of his soul’ (p. 116). Marlow is confused by a mixture of recollection and conviction of loyalty which accompanies him as he is confronted by the harrowing sight of the beautiful woman dressed in black, still in deep mourning and inconsolable a year after her beloved’s death. Marlow, the raconteur, is disconcerted by her flood of praise for her lover and is immediately overcome by pity for her and reluctance to shake her faith, which determines his approach to her and the ‘truth’. He has already said earlier in his account, at the moment when he mentions the ‘intended’ for the first time; ‘We must help them (the women) to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse.’ (p. 84)

The conversation

When he arrives carrying the bundle of Kurtz’s letters, she assumes that Marlow knew Kurtz well and was his friend. Marlow’s answer feeds her belief that intimacy between him and Kurtz was greater than it had been: ‘“Intimacy grows quickly out there … I knew him as well as it is possible for one man to know another.”’ (p. 118) But he had only known Kurtz a short time. However he tells the woman what she wants to hear and gives her the opportunity to ask for more.

She continues: ‘“And you admired him … It was impossible to know him and not to admire him. Was it?”’ (p. 118)

Marlow, already well on the way to admitting more than he can justify, nonetheless satisfies her wish for confirmation: ‘“He was a remarkable man …. It was impossible not to –” “Love him” she finished eagerly.’ (p. 118)

He takes the line of least resistance, agreeing with her and repeating her words. As he does so, the room darkens. It is the darkness of growing compromise. As she sings Kurtz’s praises, Marlow is less and less able to undeceive her. So he confirms her mistaken conviction of her lover’s goodness and the loss his death has meant to the world. When Marlow says that Kurtz will never be forgotten, she says she is determined that something of him, his words, must remain. ‘ “His words will remain” ’, Marlow reassures her (p. 120). This leads him into the moment when he is confronted with the direct challenge to his truthfulness. It is ironical that she should then say the exact truth, though unconsciously. ‘ “He died as he lived” ’, but Marlow, ‘with dull anger stirring’ in him, enmeshes himself further when he adds: ‘ “His end … was in every way worthy of his life.” ’ (p. 120) Finally, in his pity for her mingling with increasing self-disgust, he confesses the truth, ‘ “I heard his very last words” ’ (p. 121), which she immediately seizes upon and which he immediately regrets, realizing the opportunity afforded her to satisfy herself even more about her lover’s regard for her. When she begs him to repeat these last words and says she wants something to live with, he again tells her what he knows she longs to hear: ‘ “The last word he pronounced was – your name.” ’ (p. 121)

She is reassured, and goes away believing. Marlow realizes the deceit he has perpetrated, but he convinces himself that his deceit has been but a trifle and that ‘The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.’ (p. 121) To have spoken the truth would have destroyed her faith in her lover. Marlow has been drawn reluctantly into accepting that her faith, even if it is dependent on an illusion, must be preserved at all costs so that peace of mind is not destroyed. In the end, he is uneasily able to settle for the lesser of two evils, to preserve her illusion rather than destroy her faith.

Marlow describes it to the company on the yacht as ‘ “that great and saving illusion” ’ (p. 119). It is, as Ibsen describes it similarly through the mouth of Doctor Relling in Act V of The Wild Duck, ‘the saving lie’ when the doctor tells Gregers Werle: ‘ “Take the saving lie from the average man and you take his happiness away, too.” ’ ² Gregers is known to have proclaimed to local people his ‘ “claim of the ideal” ’, ³ an ideal of perfect truthfulness in all relationships, but his statement of the truth wrecks the happiness of Hjalmar’s family. His ideal of absolute truth fails to accept the reality of situations where past mistakes have to be tempered by present circumstances.

Absolute or relative? The dilemma

In a recent book the Catholic philosopher, Christopher Tollefsen, presents the traditional absolutist case that ‘to lie is always a violation of the goods of personal integrity and sociality’. ⁴ He had previously written that ‘if God is … Truth and is to be loved unconditionally, and if only in God as Truth is rest for the restless heart to be found, then only an unconditional love of Truth can be appropriate in our approach to God’. ⁵ This excludes ‘lying in a just cause’ even in the classic and extreme case of confronting ‘the Nazis at the door’ who are demanding to know whether Jews are present in the house. ⁶ He rightly and fairly presents the relativist case for lying in certain situations and refers to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s strong words that avoidance of lying can be ‘pure indolence which … seeks only to rescue our own virtue’. ⁷ Certainly Tollefsen’s argument gives the impression of nourishing personal spiritual purity. Attempts to avoid direct lying through silence, evasion, selective assertion, among other things, are, he accepts, all liable to ‘generate further enquiry’, ⁸ and, I add, even speculation and confusion, but presumably preserving the speaker’s ‘personal integrity’.

While Tollefsen refers to the Eighth Commandment’s injunction not to bear ‘false witness’, ⁹ this is surely subsumed in the second of Jesus’ two great positive commandments to ‘love our neighbour as ourselves’. And while Tollefsen aptly quotes the words of Pope John Paul II to ‘serve the truth in love’, ¹⁰ he does not speak of empathy or compassion towards an interlocutor. While he makes the key point that ‘lying threatens the autonomy of the recipient by removing from him the possibility of being fully responsible for his own actions’, ¹¹ thus creating the possibility of a chain effect of deceit, we are still imperfect beings in a fallen world and inevitably have to accept improvisation, even compromise. Jürgen Moltmann stresses that Christ came to share our plight in our fallen world and to redeem us from within: ‘If God was in Christ, then Christ brings companionship to people who are as humiliated and emptied of their identity as he was.’ ¹² The truthful person faces a dilemma in an uncertain situation in a fallen world, but it is surely a dilemma understood by Christ who in his humanity knows our situation.

Nonetheless what Marlow says is concrete and incontrovertible, and it is clear that, regardless of his motive and his dilemma, he lies to the ‘intended’ in his version of what Kurtz had said to her. However, Marlow whose religious faith is not specified is not necessarily bound by the code that Christians would uphold. After all, society is a web of complex relationships where difficult choices have to be made between two conflicting and equally distasteful or attractive evils. In that case, a strict adherence to the truth might lead to the same catastrophic outcome as Gregers Werle perpetrates. Self-protection and survival may dictate the course of greatest expediency and safety. And if the answer is much less obvious and is more a matter of our preference or opinion, we have to be sure that our subjective view of events is both valid and helpful, as the theologian H. A. Williams, says, since the Holy Spirit ‘is within us, because he can be known only subjectively, only, that is, by means of what I am, we shall never feel absolutely that it is in fact the Spirit that is working’. ¹³ In interpretation of Williams’s position, we have to trust to what we might call sanctified instinct.

Certainly, we cannot know the results of telling the truth. Just before Pilate asks his famous question on the nature of truth, Jesus says categorically: ‘ “My kingdom is not of this world.” ’ (John 18.36); ¹⁴ his kingdom is not always visible to our eyes, and we must take a great deal on trust. The philosopher John Gray, discussing Augustine, stresses that the latter ‘introduced a categorical distinction between the City of Man and the City of God. Because human life is marked by original sin, the two cities can never be one.’ ¹⁵ Our vision of the consequences of our ‘white lies’ is in his view necessarily limited by our humanity and cannot approximate to the absolute standard set by Our Lord in his vision of the kingdom that he inhabits. When Gray later asserts that ‘religions express human needs that no change in society can remove – for example the need to accept what cannot be remedied and find meaning in the chances of life’, ¹⁶ his belief in the inevitability of human frailty is surely leading him into the conviction that humanity must proceed in a spirit of improvisation and compromise where the value of seeking the truth is mired in uncertainty and relativism.

However perhaps the ‘intended’ in Conrad’s story might have recovered more easily from hearing the strict truth of Kurtz’s last words than Marlow expects. Perhaps it would have been best for her if her illusion and faith had been stripped and she had received an honest answer to her question. Are we to assume superior knowledge in the interests of preserving an illusion? Perhaps the facts of the situation, in this case the last words spoken by Kurtz, would have achieved more than the ‘saving lie’. Dr Relling’s dictum contrasts with what occurs in Ibsen’s play A People’s Enemy, immediately preceding The Wild Duck, in which Dr Stockmann denounces the insanitary baths in the local spa town, but only when he has had his findings tested and verified as objective fact disputed by the local people who see their livelihood threatened. Much of what we hear in Conrad’s novella about Kurtz’s character is simply surmise. When we seek the facts, we have the death heads, the letters, Kurtz’s reports and his last words. It is the fact of these last words that Marlow lies about.

Is it enough to argue that Marlow’s motive of compassion, even if not consciously Christian, justifies his action because it can be interpreted as acting from love, according to Paul’s injunction to ‘speak the truth in love’ (Eph. 4.15)? We cannot know the consequences of our actions, especially if we act honestly from a mixture of compassion and – in Marlow’s case – fear. While Pilate’s question reflects the uncertainty of our humanity trapped in compromise, we are given so many injunctions in Scripture to follow the truth that, while we cannot necessarily define or understand it, surely we must proceed in faith that if we act honestly and with a good conscience our action will be honoured. This may cause upset, even turmoil and anguish, but who knows how the situation would develop in the long term?

A conclusion: God’s compassion

But the question remains: Does Marlow act from love, or simply because he is trapped in fear of causing upset, reflected in the gathering darkness of growing deceit? I believe that the answer lies in a combination of both, but that through the clarity of style and expression characterizing this conversation, we are being shown that he is motivated by a clear, if vain desire to emerge from the darkness and salvage some happiness from the situation by his gesture of pity towards the grieving woman before him, saying, unconsciously echoing the words of Paul a little later in the letter to the Ephesians, ‘only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen’ (Eph. 4.29). Perhaps he is also unconsciously echoing the words of the psalmist answering his own question:

Lord, who may dwell in your sanctuary? Who may live on your holy hill? He … who speaks the truth from his heart and has no slander on his tongue, who does his neighbour no wrong and casts no slur on his fellow-man. (Psalm 15.1–3)

While this sounds like an avoidance of wrongful slander rather than a positive building up of the woman’s faith, Marlow is certainly painting Kurtz in a good light thus adding to her happiness and he is certainly speaking ‘from the heart’. His lie causes him considerable unease reflected in the renewed intensification of the darkness around him. But in his final moment Kurtz, while more appalled by the evil he sees in his own heart than seeking to reassure his beloved, may have felt genuine love for the girl that he does not express in his dying words. Marlow feels that his compromised, expedient answer is a price he has to pay for preserving her faith and her peace of mind. Speaking the truth is good, and he has not done so. What he has said however, is spoken in compassion, which might be seen as love, but in the last words of the tale, the narrator Conrad sees only ‘the heart of an immense darkness’ (p. 121). But her faith has not been shattered. Marlow will never know the consequences of his actions, he will only know the unease of uncertainty and inconclusive compromise.

For the Christian who has the example of Jesus’ perfect life, sufferings, death and resurrection and the words of assurance that he is ‘full of grace and truth’ (John 1.14) and is ‘the way and the truth and the life’ (John 14.6), the all-embracing presence of the Holy Spirit, the ‘Spirit of truth’ (John 14.17) should be a sufficient absolute demand on us to speak the truth in love and trust that the right course will prevail. What provoked Pilate’s famous question was Jesus’ statement that he came into the world ‘to testify to the truth’ (John 18.37). It is his example that Christians are called to follow. For the Christian, as the Word is ‘full of truth’, he is also full of grace. From the fallibility of our good intentions and of our compromised and compromising humanity, God came and still comes with his grace to redeem and transform us and our words into his image and likeness.

The non-Christian who is a well-meaning bringer of the awful truth has to hope that (s)he can achieve the best in the circumstances, speak from the heart, have no slander on the tongue and do their neighbour no wrong. However, acting from pity, even if tinged with fear, is surely acting from love and in faith that their words will at least not destroy the existing love. Marlow knows that with his ‘saving lie’ he has nonetheless compromised his initial determination to shun lies that he detests (p. 57). Conrad offers Marlow no direct answer, except a guilty conscience, his unease. To have told her the truth would have been ‘too dark – too dark altogether’ (p. 121). Whichever course he takes leads him into darkness, the price paid for his weakness and humanity. He is torn between the destructiveness of pity and the uncertainty of stating the truth. In this heart of darkness he is seeing the stark truth in himself. While a Christian is enjoined to tell the truth in love and faith that the right outcome, God’s purpose, will result, Marlow experiences only the depth of moral uncertainty and will not appreciate that, in acting in that situation from fear, respecting her grief and to shield her from total disillusionment despite the facts, he is acting from compassion, and in the psalmist’s terms, not slandering or wronging her lover. But surely in that situation where God knows our human frailty, we may well conclude that in his dilemma and moral ambiguity Marlow has unconsciously been fulfilling the words of the psalmist and God’s loving will towards his neighbour in her distress, grief and helplessness.