SOURCE: Devlin, Kimberly J. “They Eye and the Gaze in Heart of Darkness: A Symptomological Reading.” Modern Fiction Studies 40, no. 4 (winter 1994): 711-35.

In the following essay, Devlin analyzes the textual symptoms found in Heart of Darkness and asserts that the novella was written with a colonial bias.

In their initial theorization by Freud, symptoms engage the body's performative registers on several levels: they can traverse, for instance, behavioral patterns (as in compulsive gestures or tics), sensate functions (as in dyspnoea), communicative abilities (as in aphonias), and mental processes (as in supervalent thoughts). They are characterized alternately as excesses (as in phobias or obsessions) and absences (as in amnesic gaps), and they are marked by their formal variety, their ingenious refusal to confine themselves to any particular expressive mode of the embodied subject. Symptomology illustrates the ways in which the body's numerous performative registers are inseparable from the linguistic...