The Two River Narratives in Heart of Darkness Harry White, Irving L

The Two River Narratives in Heart of Darkness Harry White, Irving L. Finston Conradiana, Volume 42, Number 1-2, Spring/Summer 2010, pp. 1-43 (Article) Published by Texas Tech University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cnd.2010.0013 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/452492 Access provided at 9 Oct 2019 04:56 GMT from USP-Universidade de SÃƒÂ£o Paulo The Two River Narratives in Heart of Darkness HARRYWHITEANDIRVINGL.FINSTON Joseph Conrad informed his readers that “‘Youth’ is a feat of memory” and a “record of experience,” while “‘Heart of Darkness’ is experience [. .]; but it is experience pushed a little (and a very little) beyond the actual facts of the case” (“Author’s,” Youth xi). The facts of the case we believe are these: Conrad composed “Heart of Darkness” by stitching together two rather different stories. At the point in the narrative where Charlie Marlow begins his voyage upriver to meet Kurtz, Conrad pushed the novel beyond his own remembered experiences by imagin- ing Marlow journeying to a particular region deep within the heart of Africa to which the author had never traveled. The narrative then be- comes both stylistically and thematically different from what Marlow tells us he experienced during his first three months in Africa, since the horror Kurtz confronts constitutes part of a rather different tale having no necessary connection to the exploitation of the Congo depicted ear- lier in the novella. Readers have repeatedly sought to relate Marlow’s upriver voyage to the facts of Conrad’s experience. We will challenge that approach by distinguishing the Congo on which Conrad voyaged from another river in Africa that he visited, never traveled on, but which he imagined to be the one that took Marlow into the “heart of darkness” (“Heart” 95). Only then can we begin to distinguish the major themes within the novella that readers have tended to confuse. Countless critics have contended that “Heart of Darkness” confronts the evils of imperialism, but what Conrad actually witnessed on his journey up the Congo and what he at- tacked in his novella was not what he understood to be the evils of imperialism. The following article should clarify many of these issues by providing readers for the first time with the correct and most relevant information regarding Marlow’s voyage. Seeking to disentangle “fact from fiction in the actual journey upriver,” Norman Sherry has shown in considerable detail how Conrad apparently pushed his experience quite a lot: the journey Conrad made on “the Roi des Belges was very different [from Marlow’s][. .]. The Conradiana, vol. 42, no. 1–2, 2010 © Texas Tech University Press 2 CONRADIANA steamer covered the thousand miles from Kinchasa to Stanley Falls in little less than one month” on “a routine business trip” (49). There “was traffic on the great river” and “a number of well-established settle- ments” (Sherry 50, 52). It was nothing like the “mysterious and danger- ous journey” Marlow undertakes, since the Congo was not “a deserted stretch of water with an occasional station ‘clinging to the skirts of the unknown’” (Sherry 61). And once Conrad reached Stanley Falls there “would seem to be nothing in the situation at the Falls station [. .] to give Conrad the inspiration for Kurtz’s desolate and isolated Inner Sta- tion [. .]. Nothing,” Sherry concludes, “brings out more clearly Con- rad’s imaginative leap between his experience and his story” (70–1). Noting that Conrad’s voyage took only twenty-eight days, Gérard Jean-Aubry proposed psychological reasons for these imaginative leaps: it “must have seemed interminable to Conrad, for he says in ‘Heart of Darkness’: ‘It was just two months from the date we left the creek when we came to the bank below Kurtz’s station’” (Sea 167). Others believe that “the lack of explicitness—[. .] the river [. .] instead of the Congo [. .]—makes the story more suggestive” or contend that “Conrad’s nautical jottings [of his voyage up the Congo] now become unsurpassed prose” descriptions of Marlow’s river voyage (Burden 23; Hochschild 142). However, some find the suggestive prose to be less than admirable. M. M. Mahood believes that the “real trouble about this [latter] part of the tale is not that it lacks veracity [. .] but that Conrad’s own inability to realize it imaginatively results in some disastrously bad writing. We make the journey to the Inner Station only to be enveloped in adjectival fog” (27–8). Frederick Karl and Laurence Davies simply note, “The sequence in ‘Heart of Darkness’ does not follow what actually happened” (CL 1: 58n); however it is not merely the sequencing of events, but their place- ment in “Heart of Darkness” that does not follow where Conrad’s actual experiences actually took place. Conrad acknowledged what he called “the foggishness of H[eart] of D[arkness],” resulting from what he “tried to shape blindfold, as it were,” and we intend to show that the lack of explicitness and the much commented on fogginess in the latter part of the novella especially results from the fact that Conrad quite intentionally did not base that part of the story on personal experience (CL 2: 467–8). Thus the information critics have pored over having to do with Con- rad’s experiences on the Congo is not so relevant as we have been led to believe for understanding either his creative process or the issues in the novel. WHITEANDFINSTON— The Two River Narratives 3 Before Sherry’s work, critics regularly confused fact with fiction: writing just two years after the author died, Jean-Aubry noted the “pre- cision with which details are reported by Marlow in ‘Heart of Dark- ness,’” and he insisted that they are not “an imagined creation,” but are “substantially true to reality” (Joseph 65). Though Jonah Raskin would later observe that Conrad’s Congo “Diary has few similarities with the finished story” he believed what nobody seemed to doubt, that “both depict a journey up the Congo River” (117). Even after Sherry’s work, no one, including Sherry or John Batchelor who cites Sherry in his critical biography of Conrad, seems to realize that Conrad did not imagine Mar- low journeying up the Congo (see Batchelor 88). Aware that little of Con- rad’s voyage to Stanley Falls could have served as inspiration for Marlow’s voyage, why then haven’t critics thought to look elsewhere? In fact, many of the problems critics raise are largely of their own mak- ing for the simple reason that they tend to follow the river scholars have charted, but not the one that inspired Conrad. As a result they begin their analyses of “Heart of Darkness” by placing Marlow and Kurtz on the wrong river! Conrad certainly journeyed up a well travelled river, and by the time he came to write about Marlow’s adventures, enterprises along the Congo had been quite well documented for years. Among the docu- ments detailing that river were the navigational charts that Conrad drew based on his own experience as well as a public notice in the Mouve- ment Geographique that the voyage of the Roi des Belges on which Conrad served as supernumerary traveled from Stanley Pool to Stanley Falls in record time (Life 1: 133–4; Jean-Aubry, Joseph 61–2). An experienced sea- man with detailed knowledge of the Congo River, Conrad had to know that fairly numerous public records regarding that well-traveled water- way could have easily refuted any idea that Marlow was journeying up the same river Conrad traveled on or that Kurtz’s Inner Station would have been located on the Congo. The nautical information alone which Conrad supplied in the novella should suffice to convince any observant reader that Marlow was certainly not voyaging on what A. Michael Matin describes as a “thousand mile [. .] journey upriver” (xliii). There is nothing foggy about the distances Marlow traveled: At the Company’s station (based on Matadi 30 miles from the mouth of the Congo), Conrad has Marlow report that he is 1000 miles from Kurtz’s Inner Station (“Heart” 65). Mar- low then travels 200 miles overland to reach the Central Station (based partly, but, as we shall see, not entirely on Leopoldville at Stanley Pool 4 CONRADIANA and what is now Kinshasa) (“Heart” 70). From there he takes command of his boat to voyage upriver to Kurtz’s Inner Station—a journey therefore of roughly 800 miles. That distance is later confirmed when the boat is anchored eight miles below the Inner Station and Marlow reports that the homes of “the black fellows of our crew [. .] were only eight hun- dred miles away” (“Heart” 102–3). The eight miles needed to complete the journey, Marlow says, would require another three hours steaming (“Heart” 101). We also know that it took Marlow exactly two months from the day he left the Central Station to reach Kurtz’s Inner Station (“Heart” 92). Conrad was not just jotting numbers down. From them we can calculate that Marlow was steaming for a total of 300 hours over a period of 60 days to make the 808-mile voyage to the Inner Station. He therefore traveled on average five hours and 13.5 miles per day at a rate of 2.7 miles per hour. If he traveled at that rate for 60 days, we can calculate from these figures that he would have covered a distance of about 810 miles. Close enough to 808 miles, but not close enough to cover what Sherry notes is “the thousand miles from Kinchassa to Stanley Falls” (49).

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