conquerors “gone native” in Conrad and Cimino

In considering Conrad’s Heart of Darkness alongside Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, it’s interesting to think about the elasticity of this narrative template of the white subject’s flight into Nature and encounter with, or transformation by, some mythicized dark Other, an encounter apotheosized in both works by the figure of the white who has “gone native.” Kurtz in Heart of Darkness and Nick in The Deer Hunter have both “step[ped] over the threshold of the invisible,” as Conrad puts it, and adopted the ways of being and knowing found on the far side of that threshold. This uncanny transformation of the white subject through a palpably eroticized immersion in the sphere of the other—Kurtz has fallen under the “mute spell of the wilderness that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts,” while Nick is conducted by the sulfurous Frenchman into a netherworld of vice—endows each character with mystical properties even as it leaves them, to the narrator’s eye, deranged beyond remedy. Kurtz wields an occult power over the indigenous Congolese, and Nick, as was pointed out in class discussion, manages to elude the fatal bullet across years of gambling with Russian roulette, until the final confrontation with Mike. Yet both works present “going native” as a one-way street. Kurtz could no more be reintegrated to Victorian London society than Nick could rejoin the dozy, complacent routines of his Allegheny hometown; for them “the threshold of the invisible” is also the point of no return. It remains for the normative white protagonists, Mike in The Deer Hunter and Marlow in Heart of Darkness, to impart some hint of the estranging effects upon the socialized subject of the “spell of the wilderness.” Once back in London, Marlow confides, “I found myself . . . resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams.” Cimino, by contrast, uses the device of Steven’s dismemberment and psychological breakdown to literalize the existential breach permanently separating him, Mike, and Nick from their community, which remains tenaciously innocent of both “The horror! The horror!” absorbed by the men and of the radical instability of self and subject dramatized by Kurtz and Nick.