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 São 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 ac- tual facts of the case” (“Author’s,” Youth xi). The facts of the case we be- lieve 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 impe- rialism. The following article should clarify many of these issues by providing readers for the first time with the correct and most relevant in- formation regarding Marlow’s voyage. Seeking to disentangle “fact from fiction in the actual journey up- river,” 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 nau- tical 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 ex- plicitness 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 there- fore 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 calcu- late 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). Why would Conrad, who traveled and charted the route from Kin- shasa to the Falls, and who had “a passionate interest in the truth of geo- graphical facts” state at four different times in the novella that the distance Marlow voyaged was only 800 miles and, at one of those times, precisely calculate the distance and time his narrator traveled in such a way as to have him voyage twice as long as it took Conrad to make that trip only to place him 200 miles and 15 days short of the Falls?—unless of course he never imagined Marlow traveling to Stanley Falls (“Geog- raphy” 231)! In fact Marlow’s journey upriver when compared to Conrad’s is nei- ther an imaginative leap nor substantially true, as Sherry and Jean- Aubry have variously contended. Rather, we will show that Conrad fashioned Marlow’s voyage true to the geographical facts, not of the Congo but of one of its tributaries. Conrad wrote in A Personal Record that when he was about nine years old he looked at a map of Africa and said to himself “when I grow up I shall go there” (13, emphasis original). Marlow similarly recalls that when he “was a little chap” he too looked at a map of Africa and said, “[w]hen I grow up I will go there” (“Heart” 31). That however is where the similarity ends. In his Personal Record Conrad added, “I did go there. There being Stanley Falls” (13, emphasis original); but in the novella Marlow makes no mention of Stanley Falls because the Inner Station to WHITEANDFINSTON— The Two River Narratives 5 which Conrad imagined him voyaging was not, as Matin and others contend, based on what is now “Kisangani, then Stanley Falls” (Matin xliii). Also noteworthy is Richard Curle’s 1914 book which received “Conrad’s authorization” (vii). It too makes no mention of Stanley Falls as being the place where Marlow goes. We read simply that Marlow “went out to Africa and up into the blind interior [. . .] to take his steamer up to the far outposts of the interior” (Curle 51). The river Marlow takes into the “heart of darkness” is never named in the novella (“Heart 95). Conrad writes that Marlow as a child saw a “mighty big river” on a map and later that he reaches Africa at the “mouth of the big river” (“Heart” 52, 62). Though Conrad may have pushed the facts a little, he takes no great imaginative leap along what he identifies as “the big river” (“Heart” 62). The writing contains no de- liberately vague, impressionistic effects; and there is nothing terribly primitive, foggy or mysterious about the places anywhere on it. At these points in the narrative, little in Conrad’s description is that inconsistent with the things Sherry says he would have experienced on or near the Congo. After traveling 200 miles overland, as Conrad did and recorded in his Diary, Marlow spots “the big river” again (“Heart” 72). He waits at the Central Station for three months for his boat to be repaired, and then the story takes a decided turn, and so does the direction of Marlow’s travels. The narrative turns from an exposition of the looting and brutal- ity occurring in the Congo to Marlow’s tragic tale of “how I went up that river to the place where I first met the poor chap” (“Heart” 51); and ac- cordingly, instead of continuing north along the well-traveled Congo, Marlow begins steaming east into unfamiliar territory What Marlow refers to as “that river” is nothing like the big river he first encountered hundreds of miles back and nothing like the Congo upon which Conrad’s big river is based (“Heart” 51). It is described as a “creek” or “backwater” at one end (at the Central Station) and a “stream” at the other (at Kurtz’s Inner Station) (“Heart” 92, 101). In con- trast, the Congo, has an average width of five miles, is typically ten miles wide, and can extend to as wide as sixteen miles (“Congo” 712). At some of its narrowest points, like at Stanley Falls where critics continue to place Kurtz’s Inner Station, the Congo is no stream, but a river that is over one mile wide. Conrad vividly described it to Jean-Aubry as a “river wide as a sea” (Life 1: 133); so in fact, he never voyaged into dark- ness, but traveled on a river wide open to the sky that was nothing like that narrow waterway with its “high walls” of trees upon which Marlow 6 CONRADIANA felt his boat was like a beetle “crawling on the floor of a lofty portico” into “an impenetrable darkness” (“Heart” 95, 114). (In fact the Congo has been wide enough to have isolated two groups of chimpanzees for a long enough time (about two million years) so that different species evolved on different banks—the bonobos [Pan paniscus] on the left bank and the other chimps [Pan troglodytes] on the right.) (Harcourt and Stew- art 73; Varty 333). The river Marlow steams on is “deserted,” devoid of men and mod- ern machinery; and now fog begins to settle in on the writing as well as the landscape (“Heart” 93). We immediately read about “the gloom of overshadowed distances,” in a “strange world” that is “bewitched” and “cut off forever from everything you had known once—somewhere— far away—in another existence perhaps,” where “the reality [. . .] fades” (“Heart” 93). This part of the novella will be no “feat of memory” (“Au- thor’s,” Youth xi). The first words of this section announce—maybe un- intentionally and then again possibly not—that Conrad is about to take us into a, for him, strange, unreal world. He has Marlow now claim to be “cut off from the comprehension of [. . .] [his] surroundings” because, in effect, he is sending him into territory cut off from “everything” the author “had known once,” including his own travels on the Congo (“Heart” 96, 93). At these points in his novella, Conrad is trying “to shape blindfold” a “foggish” story just as his narrator is struggling “to find the channel” and pilot his boat through an uncharted, foggy rain- forest, since both author and narrator are now journeying to places nei- ther has ever seen before (“Heart” 93); and it is not only the style of the descriptive passages that reveals a radical departure from actual experi- ence, for the characters whom we encounter in this part of the novella are about as unreal as their surroundings. Marlow now has to struggle mightily at times to describe not only what he sees and hears with re- spect to his surroundings, but to characterize the people he meets in this strange place. He concludes, for example, that the Russian was simply “fabulous. His very existence was improbable, inexplicable” (“Heart” 126). Kurtz’s African mistress first appears to him to be an “apparition of a woman” (“Heart” 135); and even the one person central to this part of Marlow’s narrative does not appear as substantial as those characters he met along “the big river” (“Heart” 72): “I had heard Mr. Kurtz was in there [. . .]. Yet somehow it didn’t bring any image with it” (“Heart 81”); he “was very little more than a voice [. . .]. [T]he memory of that time it- self lingers around me, impalpable” (“Heart” 115); and “[s]ometimes I ask myself whether I ever really had seen him” (“Heart” 140). Even WHITEANDFINSTON— The Two River Narratives 7 when Marlow does finally see Kurtz, he still appears “indistinct, like a vapour exhaled from the earth” (“Heart” 142). Before he leaves the Central Station, Marlow does not feel cut off from a comprehension of his surroundings; but the reality Conrad had known once fades rapidly once he sends Marlow out from the station. That is why someone familiar with the Congo recognized as early as 1930 that while “the first part of Heart of Darkness” up to the repair of the steamer “bears the unmistakable stamp of personal experience, the rest of the story [. . .] bears all the marks of not being a personal experience” (Luetkin 42). F. R. Leavis similarly noticed that the “details and circumstances of the voyage to and up the Congo [until “the arrival at the Company’s sta- tion”] are present to us as if we were making the journey ourselves and [. . .] they carry specificities [. . .] with them”; and when considering those parts of the novella, Leavis praised Conrad’s as an “art of vivid es- sential record, in terms of things seen and incidents experienced [. . .]” (174–6). But once he began to object to the author’s “adjectival insistence upon the inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery,” Leavis turned to those portions of the novella which, he did not realize, were never in- tended to stand as a record detailing Conrad’s voyage up the Congo (177). Underlying what Leavis and others like Mahood take to be a sty- listic failure is Conrad’s decision to adopt a style suitable for placing Marlow on a river neither the author nor his narrator had ever traveled on to witness things neither had ever personally experienced. Those images used to describe what Marlow experiences along the big river are not only presented quite vividly, but Conrad has him em- phasize the reality of what he witnesses there as pointedly as he will have him insist on the fabulousness and improbability of his impres- sions during his upriver voyage. The Africans Marlow observes pad- dling along the coast give him “a momentary contact with reality” while those along the Congo “were dying slowly—it was very clear” (“Heart” 61, 66, emphasis added). When documenting the terrible truths regard- ing the European’s exploitation of the Congo and its inhabitants, Con- rad not only forgoes any impressionistic or vague formulations, but he makes it clear to his readers that he is doing so: “To speak plainly, he [Kurtz] raided the country” (“Heart” 128, emphasis added). There is no fogginess at these points in the narrative. There is also no fogginess in Conrad’s only other African tale, “An Outpost of Progress.” Conrad’s narrators find nothing impalpable, inexplicable or improbable about the vile things they see occurring 8 CONRADIANA alongside either the river in “Outpost” or “the big river” (i.e., the Congo) in “Heart of Darkness” (“Heart” 72). The “reality [. . .] fades” and we read that Marlow begins to travel to an “unknown planet” only when Conrad sends him up an unfamiliar river (“Heart” 95, 93). Two years after Conrad died, Jean-Aubry was the first to insist that, “Everything that Marlow describes [. . .] is evidently the direct reflection of scenes [. . .] impressions, recollections of Captain Korzeniowski on board his little flat-bottom fifteen-ton steamer” that took him “on the Upper Congo, from Kinshasa to Stanley Falls”—an assertion we now know to be “incorrect on nearly every count” (Congo 61; Karl 295). For his part, Conrad insisted simply that the novel was “true enough in its essentials” (“Author’s,” Tales ix). Yet, the history of criticism regarding “Heart of Darkness” remains rooted in Jean-Aubry’s incorrect account, and critics continue to ignore the fact that neither Conrad nor anyone else during his lifetime ever indicated that Marlow’s descriptions were meant to reflect the author’s voyage on the Upper Congo. So where then did Conrad imagine Marlow going when he and his narrative take this decided turn into the “heart of darkness” (“Heart” 95)? When Conrad wrote William Blackwood regarding a projected work of fiction, he did not name the river on which his narrator would be trav- eling, but told him simply that the narrative deals with a man’s “experi- ences on a river in Central Africa” (CL 2: 139). In all likelihood, “in” has the force of “within,” and so the unnamed river Conrad had in mind was an inland river deep within “Central” Africa and not one like the Congo “with its head in the sea” that empties into the ocean along the Western coast of the continent (“Heart” 52). In fact Marlow navigates “on” the Congo River only a short distance, and then not in Central Africa, but about thirty miles from the coastline to the Company Station (at Matadi) (“Heart” 62). Conrad went to Africa not with the hope of undertaking the routine business trip he wound up taking with Camille Delcommune, the Congo Company Manager at Kinshasa; rather he was very much look- ing forward to commanding “a steamboat, belonging to M. [Alexandre] Delcommune’s exploring party” (CL 1: 52). Alexandre, the brother of Camille, worked not on routine business, but as an explorer, and the voyage Conrad still hoped for after his return from Stanley Falls was to be “a new expedition to the River Kassai [. . .]. I shall probably be leav- ing Kinchassa again for a few months, possibly even for a year or longer,” he wrote to Maria Tyszkowa, telling her not to worry should she not hear from him for a long time (CL 1: 58). The Kasai, Sherry notes, WHITEANDFINSTON— The Two River Narratives 9

“was relatively unexplored” (55); in fact there was in Conrad’s day an estimated “14000 miles of riverbanks to explore” in the Congo region (Taunt); so once his routine business trip had been completed, Conrad still had very real expectations of traveling on an expedition that would take him for many months into areas deep within the heart of central Africa where there was no postal service nor any other means of modern communication. When Conrad first arrived at Kinshasa, he discovered that the boat, The Florida, that he was to command up the Kasai River, had been wrecked; and so he was immediately put on the Roi des Belges as second in command up the Congo and never took command of the hoped-for new expedition into the Kasai valley region.

The journey on the Kasai would have taken Conrad deep into south- central Africa and been a far greater achievement than the upriver trip to Stanley Falls, which [. . .] held few uncertainties. There was in the Kasai expedition sufficient challenge for someone like Conrad, and it would, in a sense, duplicate those early expeditions, not the least of them Stanley’s, which he had assimilated in his reading since childhood. (Karl 298–9)

What we are proposing is that the challenging and uncertain journey on the Kasai that Conrad hoped for was assimilated into his writing from the moment he has Marlow take his steamboat upriver to find Kurtz. Zdzis`aw Najder has noted with respect to Conrad’s taking com- mand of The Florida that he “could not have assumed command immedi- ately on an unknown river and in unfamiliar conditions” (132). Marlow however gets his appointment “very quick” because one of the Com- pany’s “captains had been killed” (“Heart” 54). Captain Fresleven had been working for the company “a couple of years already” and would have been familiar with the route to Kurtz’s Inner Station, if the com- pany had in fact sent him there (“Heart” 54). However, it appears that neither Fresleven nor the manager, who voyages with Marlow, nor any- body else in the company had or has any familiarity with the route to Kurtz’s station (just why that is so will be considered shortly); and Mar- low must navigate without any charts to guide him: “you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel” (“Heart” 93). By placing his narrator on an “unknown river and in unfamiliar conditions,” Conrad created for Marlow, who as a child would lose himself in “all the glories of exploration,” the kind of exploratory adventure in Africa that he had 10 CONRADIANA

looked forward to but never got to go on (noted below is Conrad’s admi- ration for explorers) (“Heart” 52). The added challenge is that Marlow had never been a “fresh-water sailor,” let alone one who commanded a riverboat; so he can finally boast aboard the Nellie, “I managed not to sink the steamboat on my first [fresh-water] trip” (“Heart” 51, 94). Two additional points are worth mentioning: it is also unlikely that the manager would employ a “volunteer skipper” to pilot a steamer up the Congo with himself on board, unless, as Watts has noted, he wanted the boat wrecked (“Heart” 73; “Notes” 106). Even so, the manager would not have allowed a volunteer to take the company boat on a wide and deep, well-traveled river where it could endanger other shipping, be- come completely submerged underwater once the skipper wrecked it, and where it would thus prove difficult or even impossible for the man- ager and others to swim to safety. A treacherous, but also narrow, shal- low and empty river, like the Kasai as Conrad imagined it, would afford a convenient place to wreck a boat, especially if the boat, as we find out, is sunk near the bank of “that river” (see below) (“Heart” 51). Secondly, if anyone voyaged on the Congo between Leopoldville and Stanley Falls, he would pass “not a few steamers” so wrecking one boat could not pos- sibly delay for over five months a sick man’s recovery and return from Stanley Falls (Morel, Red 124). Obviously the manager counts on the fact that there is no regular traffic traveling to and from Kurtz’s station. The region of the Kasai valley was known to be rich in ivory, and that is no doubt a major reason why the Belgians commissioned Conrad to explore it. Alexandre Delcommune, with whom he was to voyage, had explored the region in 1888 and noted that the “only trade known to the natives is in ivory [. . .]. The area [. . .] is populated by herds of ele- phants” (242; translation White). Conrad therefore situated Kurtz’s trad- ing post along the Kasai in part so that he could locate it within what was known to be “the true ivory-country” (“Heart” 69). In 1890, when Conrad arrived in Africa, the river had been scarcely known till eight years before (Delcommune 221). It had not been at all heavily traveled, settled or explored; and that is perhaps why Kurtz, just about the only person stationed there, can still call it “my river” (“Heart” 116). In Conrad’s day it could be reached in three or four days travel about 125 miles up the Congo from Stanley Pool to a settlement area known as Kwamouth (at the mouth of the Kwa, into which the Kasai flows, just upriver from the Congo). In fact Conrad reported in his “Up-River Book” that the Roi des Belges moored at that very spot alongside a Catholic mission located at the “[e]ntrance to the Kassai” WHITEANDFINSTON— The Two River Narratives 11

(the portion of the river flowing into the Congo at that point was vari- ously named the Kasai or the Kwa) (22–23). Just five years earlier, in 1885, the station which was situated on the left bank of the entrance to the Kasai was described as “destined to be one of the most important on the [Congo] river, as it will be the outlet for all trade of the valley of the Kassai” (Taunt). In April, 1890, a few months before Conrad arrived in Africa, an outpost was established at Lusambo, on a major tributary of the Kasai. By 1893, three years after Conrad left Africa, firms began to open “factories along the Kasai and its tributaries” (Morel, King 189). The station at Kwamouth and not the one at Kinshasa was most likely the model for the Central Station, or more to the point, the place where Conrad imagined the station to be located (see below). The Kasai is the chief, and as Delcommune described it, “the most important of the tributaries of the Congo” (221, translation White). It originates in what is now Angola and is the longest river in the southern Congo basin, running for 1100 miles through central Africa and what in Kurtz’s time was known as The Congo Free State before it joins the Congo River (“Kasai River” 1512). When Conrad moored at the river, it was known that there were “500 miles of clear navigation on [the] Kas- sai,” although this does not mean that the remainder of the river, which is quite narrower and shallower, was not navigable (Taunt). A flat bot- tom boat with a shallow draft, a “steamboat [. . .] exactly like a decked scow,” as Marlow describes his vessel, could make the additional 300 miles Marlow voyages (“Heart” 108). It just would not be “clear naviga- tion,” as Marlow indicates: “I don’t pretend to say that steamboat floated all the time. More than once she had to wade for a bit, with twenty cannibals splashing around and pushing” (“Heart” 94). One of the indicators that Marlow is not voyaging on a river as deep as the Congo is what he uses to take soundings. While voyaging up the Congo, Conrad recorded regular soundings of three fathoms or more (“Up-River Book” 23, 24, 28). That would require a sounding pole over eighteen feet in length, which would be impossible to handle. Navigating on the Congo, they would have had to use a lead line, a length of rope, knotted at typically one fathom or six foot intervals with a plumb at the end that can sink to depths lower than what can be reached with a pole. However, because Marlow is navigating a much shallower river, Conrad has him measure its depths with a “sounding-pole” (“Heart” 109). Conrad also pushed the facts of his experience in such a way so as to move the sunken boat as well as the Central and the Inner Stations off the Congo to the Kasai. At Stanley Falls, where Conrad’s voyage ended, 12 CONRADIANA

the Congo flows latitudinally in a Westerly direction with riverbanks on its north and south sides; however, where Marlow’s voyage ended, he found that Kurtz’s “station was on the west side” which means that Conrad located it on a river or a portion of a river that flows longitudi- nally (“Heart” 108). In fact, 800 miles upstream from the Congo, where Conrad placed Kurtz’s station, the Kasai flows in a northerly direction with banks running along its West and East sides. We should also note that Conrad’s boat had been wrecked on the Congo “a little below the mouth of the Kassai” where the Congo flows longitudinally in a southerly direction (Luetkin 41); however, in “Heart of Darkness” we are told that Marlow’s boat “sank near the south bank” less than “three hours” upriver from the Central station which means that it sank on a part of a river that flows latitudinally (“Heart” 73). In fact, once the Ka- sai merges with the Sankuru, it flows in a Westerly direction (with banks on its South and North sides) all the way to its confluence with the Congo at Kwamouth where the Roi Des Belge moored and Conrad noted: “[e]ntrance to Kassai [. . .]. On S[outh] side a bright beach” (“Up-River” 22, emphasis added). Recall that the Kasai at Kwamouth could be reached in three to four days travel up the Congo from Kinshasa. The entire trip would take one in a northerly direction; so there is no southern bank alongside the Congo three hours upriver from the station at Kinshasa. A boat sunk on a southern bank, three hours upriver from the company sta- tion would mean not only that Conrad imagined the wreckage to be lo- cated on the Kasai, but also that the Central Station, being but three hours downriver, would have to be located at Kwamouth which is situated at the entrance to the Kasai and not Kinshasa, which is not three hours away, but up to four days travel time from the Kasai with its southern bank. In fact, Conrad situated the station alongside “a back water,” a term that can refer to a tributary (like the Kasai) of a larger river (such as the Congo) (“Heart” 71); and he placed it a noticeable distance from the big river. Standing alongside that backwater Marlow can hear a “deadened burst of mighty splashes and snorts [. . .] from afar [. . .] in the great river.” (“Heart” 86, emphasis added). Also, when Marlow arrived at the station he spotted a “fence of rushes” with a “gap” in them (“Heart” 72). Later, leaning against his dismantled steamer, he notices directly before him “shiney patches [of moonlight] on the black creek” and in another di- rection, moonlight also glittering “over the great river” that he can “see through a [. . .] gap” from the other side of the same high “wall of matted vegetation” that he spotted when he first arrived at the station (“Heart” 81, emphasis added). WHITEANDFINSTON— The Two River Narratives 13

Conrad knew that at Kwamouth, the “entrance to [the] Kassai [is] rather wide” however the extent and nature of his knowledge of the rest of that river remains uncertain (“Up-River” 22). He most likely got con- siderable information by reading maps, which he liked to do—perhaps a map of Africa like the one Marlow finds in the Company’s European offices, “marked with all the colours of a rainbow” indicating the territo- rial possessions and protectorates of various European countries, in- cluding England, Belgium, France and Germany (“Heart” 55). Just such a map was drawn and printed by Messrs. J. Bartholemew & Co., Edin- burgh.2 It depicts the Congo in some detail as a wide river, but the en- tirety of the Kasai is drawn with a single black line, thus giving no indication that the river is anywhere anything other than the kind of narrow waterway Marlow voyages on. As early as 1930, Otto Luetkin, who spent eight years working as a riverboat captain in the Congo, offered some interesting observations and insights that critics have tended to ignore. Luetkin recognized that some of “Heart of Darkness” bore “the unmistakable stamp of personal experience,” but much of it had “all the marks of not being a personal experience” (42). His perceptive remarks bear a striking resemblance to Conrad’s statement about “Heart of Darkness” being experience, yet ex- perience pushed a little beyond actual facts. Luetkin assumed that “the up-river voyage” had to be “related from hearsay” since, as he well knew, that part of the novella could not possibly have been a record of what Conrad would have actually experienced along the upper Congo (42): The “description given of the place where they find Kurtz does not fit Stanley Falls” (Luetkin 42). The Captain surmised on the basis of his knowledge of the region and descriptions of it in the novella that Con- rad might have turned “from the main river up one or other of the tribu- taries” and most likely “might have been to Lusambo on the Kasai” (Luetkin 42, emphasis added). Luetkin’s information and insights were revealing, and critics might have paid greater attention to them had he not mistakenly concluded from what he knew and read that Conrad never steamed up the Congo. He should have questioned instead whether Conrad really meant Mar- low’s voyage to reflect his memories of that particular river. Of course in 1930 it was not generally assumed, what is now taken for gospel, that Marlow voyages up the Congo, and that is no doubt one reason why Luetkin saw no reason to argue that he didn’t. It seemed clear to him who was familiar with the region and its rivers that what was being de- scribed in “Heart of Darkness” was a voyage up the Kasai River. Never- 14 CONRADIANA theless, as so often happens, a critical inertia was soon enough put in place, academics customarily giving more credit to what other aca- demics say over what a sea captain or even the novella itself tells us; so Luetkin has received little notice or credit for what he revealed. There were two spoils Conrad said he took out of Africa, the short story, “An Outpost of Progress” and “Heart of Darkness” which he de- scribed as “a story much as my Outpost of Progress”(CL 2: 140). Indeed the outpost in the story appears much like the Inner Station Kurtz first took over. In the short story we are told that “hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side” in the silent river (“Outpost” 94); in the novella Marlow is given the exact same words to describe what he sees on his silent river: “hippos and alligators,” he says, “sunned themselves side by side” (“Heart” 93). The station in the story is set up “in the centre of Africa” in what Con- rad describes as a strange, mysterious, incomprehensible wilderness sur- rounded by “primitive nature and primitive man” isolated from “the high organization of civilized crowds” (“Outpost” 90, 89). No one could possi- bly believe that Conrad based this outpost on the station at Stanley Falls, since he clearly situates it, not on the bank of a well-traveled river way, but near a “silent river” (“Outpost” 94); and in “Heart of Darkness,” Con- rad similarly insists on the “great silence,” the “interminable miles of si- lence” of the river Marlow navigates (93, 98). Certainly it is true enough that the natives living just below Stanley Falls would “have regarded both steamers and whistles as commonplace occurrences and are unlikely to have been affected by them” as are those who are scared off by Marlow’s whistle (Sherry 54–55); however those natives downriver from Kurtz’s station live nowhere near Stanley Falls or the Congo (“Heart” 146). Much like Kurtz’s station, the outpost in the story is also running out of supplies and for the same reason, because “one of the Company’s steamers had been wrecked” (“Outpost” 109). Consequently “the Direc- tor was busy with the other, relieving distant and important stations on the main river” of which this silent river is therefore most likely a tribu- tary (“Outpost” 109). Although this river is also not named in the story, Conrad did identify it elsewhere: “Out Post of Progress,” he wrote, was a story “of the Congo”: “life in a lonely station on the Kassai” (CL 1: 24). Those parts of “Heart of Darkness” that take place alongside “the big river” bring to the foreground the historical events that remained in the background of “Outpost of Progress,” after which the novella begins to develop more fully the tragic personal narrative first sketched in “Out- post” (“Heart” 72, 62). The upriver portions of “Heart of Darkness,” as in WHITEANDFINSTON— The Two River Narratives 15 his short story, draw only tangentially on Conrad’s experiences along the Congo: in “Outpost,” the wrecked steamer is based on The Florida, the Company Director would be Camille Delcommune, and the main river on which he busies himself, the Congo; but that is about the end of it. In “Heart of Darkness” as in “Outpost,” Conrad leaves the Congo (“the main river” in the story, “the big river” in the novella) down river well outside his frame of reference once he imagines Marlow voyaging up the Kasai (“Outpost” 185; “Heart” 71). What Marlow repeatedly identifies as “that river”—“that river [. . .] where I first met the poor chap,” the water- way where he will work for “a Company for trade on that river,” or “that river [. . .] travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world”—that river is nothing like the big river (“Heart” 51, 52, 92). Indeed, the terms “big river” or “great river” are never used to describe what Marlow iden- tifies simply as “that river” on which he voyages (“Heart” 71, 92, 105). There is thus ample reason to believe that Conrad imagined Kurtz degen- erating in the same place Kayerts and Carlier did in “Outpost,” far from the main or big river at a lonely station on the Kasai where, as we read in the short story, the “nearest trading post” is “about three hundred miles away” (“Outpost” 87). For we should also note that when Kurtz decides to turn round and paddle back to the Inner Station, we are told he does so “after coming three hundred miles” (“Heart” 90). An outpost would be a likely place for Kurtz to re-arrange things and split his party, sending one “fleet of canoes in charge of an English half-caste clerk” with his last ship- ment of ivory on to the Central Station while he went “alone in a small dugout with four paddlers” back to the Inner Station (“Heart” 90). In- deed, when at Kurtz’s Station, Marlow is told that there is “a military post three hundred miles from here” (“Heart” 139). Let’s recall that upriver from Kwamouth, where Marlow’s voyage begins, the Kasai contained 500 miles of clear navigation, and if we add to that the 300 miles needed to get further upriver from the military out- post to Kurtz’s station, we get a total of 800 miles—the very distance Marlow voyages to get from the Central to the Inner Station. All the in- formation fits so that we can now correctly identify where Conrad imag- ined Marlow meeting Kurtz. Conrad located Kurtz’s Inner Station on the west bank of the Kasai, 300 miles upriver from a military post and just over 800 miles from the Central Station situated at Kwamouth where the Kwa (a.k.a. Ka- sai) and the Congo rivers converge. As Hochschild has noted, throughout the vast territory, King Leopold’s “rule over his colony was carried out by white men in charge of districts and river stations” (116). The “entire system was militarized. 16 CONRADIANA

Force Publique [sic] garrisons were scattered everywhere, often supply- ing firepower to the companies under contract” (Hochschild 116). These “companies operated as an extension of the Congo state” (Hochschild 163). By placing Kurtz’s station where he did, Conrad located it three hundred miles beyond the militarized Congo state; and we might even assume that Kurtz deliberately traveled as deep as he did into the heart of Africa so that he could set up a non-militarized trading post beyond Belgian control. In any event, when Conrad has Kurtz decide to begin his raids, he has him do so at the military post that marks the extent of the Belgian incursion into the Kasai valley region (i.e., five hundred miles upriver from Kwamouth). Returning to that as yet unconquered region, a transformed Kurtz then becomes a forerunner of the Belgian conquest that is fast approaching and which will be complete when his station is taken over after his death (more on these matters below). There is one more river worth considering: Batchelor notes that Con- rad “spent a few days on the river Berau in Dutch east Borneo, a brief ex- perience which was to be put to lasting artistic use in his novels” such as Almayer’s Folly and Lord Jim (39). Perhaps he also put it to artistic use when writing “Heart of Darkness.” Compare these passages from Lord Jim, a work Conrad was composing at the same time he wrote “Heart of Darkness,” with similar passages in the novella: “At the first bend [in the river] he [Jim] [. . .] faced the immovable forests rooted deep in the soil, [. . .] everlasting in the shadowy might of their tradition [. . .]. Then in a long, empty reach he was grateful to a troop of monkeys who came right down on the bank and made an insulting hullabaloo on his pas- sage” (Lord 243–4). Earlier when Stein had made the trip, the “ship had been fired upon from the woods [. . .] all the way down the river,” and the “brigantine was nearly stranded on a sandbank at the bar, where she ‘would have been perishable beyond the act of man’” (Lord 239). There is one more important feature of comparison: the natives. The Africans whom Kayerts and Carlier encounter at their station on the Ka- sai are strong, healthy specimens: “‘Look at the muscles of that fellow,’ Carlier observes. ‘I wouldn’t care to get a punch in the nose from him. Fine arms’” (“Outpost” 93). The Africans Marlow encounters along his river journey also look and act nothing like the weak, starving, en- chained, and dying “criminals” whom he saw back by the big river (“Heart” 64). It is an indication in both works of what Africans looked like before the Europeans enslaved them. Those living in or near what Conrad imagined the Kasai River basin to be like, where in fact “exploita- tion had begun a little later than elsewhere,” are shown to be infinitely WHITEANDFINSTON— The Two River Narratives 17 better off than those who are enslaved to serve the greed of European conquerors working 800 miles away along the big river (Hochschild 260). Conrad did not have to imagine what the people of the Kasai valley region would look like. He had firsthand knowledge of the strength and vitality of African natives and put it to use in the novel:

Now and then a boat from the shore gave one a momentary contact with reality. It was paddled by black fellows. They shouted, sang; their bodies steamed with perspiration; [. . .] but they had bone, muscle, a wild vital- ity, an intense energy of movement, that was as natural and true as the surf along their coast. They wanted no excuse for being there. They were a great comfort to look at. (“Heart” 61)

Where he perhaps overstated the unreality of the strange river on which Marlow would voyage and the strangeness of characters like Kurtz and his Russian disciple, Conrad insisted on the very real health and good spirits of the first Africans Marlow sees while he is sailing off the coast. Conrad knew what was natural and true about the people of Africa be- fore the white man put iron collars round their necks and worked them so mercilessly that anyone could see the marks of conquest on their “every rib” and the “joints of their limbs [. . .] [that looked] like knots in a rope” (“Heart” 64). However, when Conrad came to pushing Mar- low’s narrative beyond the actual facts of his African experience, he based that picture of native life to a great extent on various literary sources. The second part is clearly a more “literary” work, employing fa- miliar myths and archetypes such as a pilgrimage or a descent into the underworld; but it also employs various unrealistic prejudices, biases, and superstitions about Africa and its people culled from the literature of exploration and anthropology—or what in Conrad’s day passed for these genres—as a way of representing Marlow’s “unreal,” fantastic journey into the first ages of man (“Heart” 92–3, 95). The false primitive depiction of the people of Africa originates with and is exclusive to the upriver portion of the narrative which, Luetkin was the first to recog- nize, “bore all the marks of not being a personal experience” and had to be “related from hearsay” (42). In fact, Conrad admitted that his “experience” of the Congo was “limited” to the “course of the main river” (CL 3: 95); and when he did travel overland, the native villages he passed were “distant” from or “quite invisible” to him (“Congo” 165, 164). He therefore had little first- hand knowledge of the primitive interior of Africa or the lives of the 18 CONRADIANA people who lived there, and his inexperience shows in the vague and uncertain way he has Marlow report on things the author never saw. Marlow is able to see clearly and describe precisely what is happening to the natives alongside the course of the big river. He knows for certain that the “unhappy savages” alongside the big river could not be “called criminals” (“Heart” 64); and he can clearly see them strolling “despon- dently” or in “attitudes of [. . .] despair” (“Heart” 66). However, once Marlow travels beyond the river Conrad knew, his uncertainty increases accordingly. Unable to tell whether the distant drumbeats mean “war, peace, or prayer” and whether the natives were “cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us,” he can only wonder, “What was there [. . .]? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage—who can tell? [. . .]” (“Heart” 96). In Lord Jim, Conrad has Marlow observe that “three hundred miles beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail boats the haggard utilitar- ian lines of our civilization whither and die, to be replaced by the pure exercises of imagination, that have [. . .] sometimes the deep hidden truthfulness [. . .] of works of art [. . .]” (282). In “Heart of Darkness,” Conrad pushed Marlow’s boat not three hundred, but eight hundred miles beyond the civilization he knew into a world of all but pure imagi- nation, filling the gaps in his knowledge with stereotypical depictions of Africans that at too many times seem hardly closer to the truthfulness of their lives than what we find in Vachel Lindsay’s “The Congo.” These false primitive stereotypes evident in the upriver section may have re- sulted from a phenomenon cognitive psychologists have noted in ordi- nary recall, that the less information actually available in memory the greater the influence of stereotypical beliefs (Hirstein 62). In any event, from what we now know about Marlow’s upriver journey, we might characterize it not as a distortion of Conrad’s actual experience, but as a confabulation in which information unavailable to the author regarding the African interior was replaced by readily available stereotypes of Africa and its people. Had Marlow’s narrative ended along the big river, much of the con- fusion regarding the novella, the criticism of its style as well as Conrad’s views regarding Africa and its people might never have arisen. It cer- tainly would be difficult to charge Conrad with being a “thoroughgoing racist” as Achebe did in his influential essay—a charge he levels by fail- ing to see any distinction between the two rivers and their different narratives (11). Achebe typically, mistakenly believes Marlow’s voyage “take[s] place on the River Congo,” and to support his charge of racism, he then cites roughly thirteen passages drawn from Marlow’s upriver WHITEANDFINSTON— The Two River Narratives 19 journey and not one taken from the three months spent along the Congo (4). The single passage he cites that does describe what occurred along- side the Congo, where the natives are “all dying slowly,” is referenced not to accuse Conrad of racism, but as evidence of the “kind of liberal- ism” that “touched all the best minds of the age” (Achebe 10). So we might suppose that Conrad appears to be a racist in the fictionalized, upriver portions of the novella and a liberal when dealing with events that he actually witnessed in the Congo. If so, there is no paradox here, for one may even be a thoroughgoing racist, as Achebe believes Conrad was, and still be appalled, as Conrad clearly was, by the treatment of the Africans. Let us not forget however that when on “all sides war, massacres, crimes” continued in the Congo, Marlow is shown repeatedly saving the lives of the natives from senseless slaughter (Morel, Congo 12; “Heart” 112, 146). More to the point, Conrad did address the race question in a way that Achebe ignored. Achebe never identified with any precision what he understood by the term racist. If the author of “Heart of Dark- ness” may have been careless in his depiction of African life, there nev- ertheless can be no question that the man was no racist, if we mean by racism the belief that black people constitute a subhuman species. “The State do [sic] not look upon us as men, but as monkeys, and that is why they treat us so” (qtd. in Morel, Congo 87). Thus did one African explain the plight of the natives; and in 1904 Morel complained about the en- slavement of Africans and that there “are still people to be found who think that the African native is a brute beast impervious to human senti- ment” (King 35). A year before, Conrad wrote to Roger Casement simi- larly noting that Europe “seventy years ago” had “put down the slave trade on humanitarian grounds,” but still tolerated slavery in the “Congo State” (CL 3: 96). The “black man,” Conrad noted, “is as deserv- ing of humanitarian regard as any animal,” yet the black man is no mere animal, and “as a matter of fact” is “deserving of greater regard” since he “shares with us the consciousness of the universe in which we live” (CL 3: 96). Even before that, in 1899 when “Heart of Darkness” was first pub- lished, at a time when it was “hard to get news out of the Congo,” Con- rad revealed not only that Europeans treated Africans more inhumanely than they would any animal, but indicated as well that being so brutal- ized, the Africans were as fully conscious as any human being would be of their own “pain, abandonment, and despair” (Morel, Congo 69; “Heart” 66). The novella also made it clear that while its narrator re- 20 CONRADIANA mained devoted to Kurtz, that particular Englishman does not believe meeting him was worth the life of his African helmsman of whom Mar- low says what he never said of Kurtz, that he shared a “distant kinship” with the man (“Heart” 119). Those words are most significant, coming as they did at a time when Africans were thought to be kin to monkeys. Still and all, in a passage that Achebe found most offensive, Conrad has Marlow speak again of a “remote kinship,” this time with the na- tives making “horrid faces” (“Heart” 96). When speaking of kinship, Marlow regards the black man as kin to the white in a positive way. However the kinship of white to black is seen negatively: Marlow con- siders the white man’s kinship with the howling and spinning blacks to be “ugly” (“Heart” 96). Whatever we might make of Marlow’s judg- ments, we must keep in mind that they result from what these various people, whether black or white, are seen to be doing, as helmsmen—“he had done something, he had steered”—or as Africans making “horrid faces,” and are not based on prejudices regarding who or what these persons are (“Heart” 119, 96). If there is bias on Marlow’s (or Conrad’s) part, it is not racial, but cultural. Like Lord Jim, originally planned as a short work dealing with the shipboard episode, or like Under Western Eyes, which Conrad planned to limit to events that took place in Russia, “Heart of Darkness” was origi- nally conceived as “a short story,” a “tale (short) in the manner of Youth” (CL 2: 132, 133). It would deal with a “subject [that] is of our time dis- tinc[t]ly [. . .] much as [. . .] Outpost of Progress [...] but [. . .] ‘takes in’ more—is a little wider—is less concentrated on individuals” (CL 2: 140). The above letters of December, 1898, describe what would become those parts of the novella that take place alongside the big river; but a month later, Conrad reported that the “thing has grown on me” (CL 2: 147). In yet another three weeks he is in “seventh heaven to find” that Cunning- hame Graham likes “the H[eart] of D[arkness] so far,” but warns his friend, who he knows has strong political interests in that timely subject that the narrative had dealt with so far, that it now has become “wrapped up in secondary notions that You—even You!—may miss it. And also You must remember that I don’t start with an abstract notion” (CL 2: 157). Conrad didn’t all of a sudden turn into a racist; rather having ex- posed the greed and brutality of Europeans working along the Congo, he was left with no more story to tell; so he tacked on another narrative based in part on a story he had already written and which like “Out- post” but unlike the earlier Congo River portions of this new work was WHITEANDFINSTON— The Two River Narratives 21 not “a record of experience” and was “no longer a matter of sincere colouring. It was like another art altogether” (“Author’s,” Youth xi). Consequently, while the big river sections were composed largely in the style of nineteenth-century realism, the voyage upriver would employ another art altogether, that is, an impressionistic style more appropriate for dealing with myth, fantasy and archetype to take the narrative into “another existence” well beyond any specific time, place or country (“Heart” 93). A story that began with a timely subject that did not con- centrate on individuals and which as such appealed to the abstract no- tions of a socialist like Graham eventually turned into a more personal story about one individual whose downfall would reveal Conrad’s “sec- ondary notion” that, as he wrote to Graham a year before, “the noblest causes” of men, their “beliefs and hopes” are “tragic” and that every “cause is tainted” (CL 2: 25). The “secondary” part of “Heart of Dark- ness” was in effect an afterthought whose subject would no longer specifically be an account of the atrocities committed in the Congo, but would reveal a general “hopelessness darker than night” (CL 2: 157). This change of direction may be gauged by the fact that to find Kurtz, Conrad has Marlow voyage in a direction that will take him 800 miles away from those areas of the Congo that had been taken over and ex- ploited by the Europeans at the time Conrad made his voyage. He also has Marlow wait three months alongside the Congo for his boat to be re- paired whereas the author spent at most only two days before beginning his voyage on the Roi des Belges (“Heart” 75). Once Marlow boarded his boat, the narrative was no longer going to focus on the greed and vio- lence Conrad had witnessed on his river journey; so the author extended Marlow’s stay on land to give himself enough time to detail and dis- pense with this material. The atrocities committed in the Congo was baggage, much of which Marlow was not going to take on board so that Conrad would be free to concentrate on different themes in his other river narrative. To better understand what “Heart of Darkness” revealed to be hap- pening in the Congo, but just as importantly what Conrad also recog- nized not to be happening, we need to identify just what it is that the novel attacks. For just as most everyone misses the boat and assumes Conrad has Marlow steam up the Congo, what Christopher GoGwilt calls “the novel’s critique of imperialism” is also a notion that most now mistakenly take for granted (109). According to Robert Burden, the modern “consensus is that Heart of Darkness [sic] is an anti-imperialist book” (24). Adam Hochschild goes 22 CONRADIANA so far as to call it “one of the most scathing indictments of imperialism in all literature” (146). Yet Hochschild finds it curious that “its author [. . .] thought himself an ardent imperialist where England was concerned” (146); and, as Eloise Knapp Hay notes, all contemporary critics have read Marlow’s opening remarks “as a straightforward, unambiguous apology for British imperialism” (135). However, a review which ap- peared in the Manchester Guardian on 10 December 1902 stated, “It must not be supposed that Mr. Conrad makes an attack upon colonization, ex- pansion, even upon Imperialism”; and Conrad judged it to be “fairly in- telligent” (CL 2: 468). These days there really does not appear to be any clear consensus as to whether the novella actually amounts to a critique or a qualified de- fense of imperialism, but the differences we find among Conrad scholars may very well be a product of their own making for the simple reason that they have failed to see that “Heart of Darkness” does not actually depict an imperialist situation. It would seem that Conrad begins somewhat gratuitously by having his first narrator praise British explorers and empire builders. This seems to have been done perhaps to assure his British reading public and his conservative publisher, William Blackwood, not to worry, since the story he had written would not be about the things Britain had done or was doing. We also need to realize that the first narrator might merely be re-iterating words that Marlow and the others heard him say aboard the Nellie. He, who at the end of the novella will describe the Thames as leading “into the heart of an immense darkness,” is not necessarily giv- ing expression to ideas he has retained after having heard Marlow’s tale (“Heart” 162). Conrad similarly has Marlow begin by referring to people and events also outside the scope of the upcoming narrative, so there is rea- son to believe that there’s more than just praise and assurance operating here. Conrad wrote that the “heroes of my boyhood” were found in the “world of explorers and discoverers” (“Travel” 87); and no passage of years could dim his admiration for their “selfless spirit and manly faith- fulness to their task pursued in solitude or with a few devoted hench- men [. . .] with a calm mind and a steady heart” (“Travel” 87). In “Geography and Some Explorers,” he would draw the very same dis- tinctions he had put at the beginning of “Heart of Darkness.” He found in “the discovery of America, the occasion of the greatest outburst of reckless cruelty and greed known to history” and saw first hand in Africa “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of hu- WHITEANDFINSTON— The Two River Narratives 23 man consciousness and geographical exploration” (“Geography” 3). However, by comparison, he noted that “Cook’s three voyages are free from any taint” of “an acquisitive spirit [. . .] or the desire for loot, dis- guised in more or less fine words,” and Sir John Franklin, he believed, was also “another good man” of “professional prestige and high per- sonal character” (“Geography” 17, 10). The first narrator’s praise of Cook and Franklin does not serve, not primarily at least, to celebrate im- perialism, but exploration and those selfless men who undertook it un- tainted by greed; and Marlow responds to his praises by immediately indicating that his story will not deal with exploration, empire building, or selfless men. It needs to be regarded as a reoccurrence in modern times of the kind of greed and looting that took place in Britain nineteen hundred years ago. What the reviewer in The Manchester Guardian would say of the novella—that is it not about colonization—is the first thing Conrad has Marlow point out about the Roman invasion of Britain (inserted in brackets are words that Conrad removed from the manuscript [qtd. in Kimbrough 10n]) :

They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more [. . .]. They were conquerors and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising form the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what could be got. [That’s all. The best of them is they didn’t give up pretty fictions about it. Was there, I wonder, an association on a philanthropic basis to develop Britain, with some third rate King for a president and solemn old senators discoursing about it approvingly and philosophers [. . .] praising it, and men in market places crying it up. ... No!] It was just robbery with violence, aggravated on a great scale [. . .]. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only.An idea at the back of it; not a sen- timental pretence but an idea; [. . .] something you can set up, bow down before, and offer sacrifices to. (“Heart” 50–1)

Avrom Fleishman quite perceptively notes “the distinction in this pas- sage between ‘colonists’ and ‘conquerors’” (97). It is one that “can be ap- plied throughout Conrad’s tales and explains much about his varying judgments of imperialist ventures in his own time” (Fleishman 97–8). 24 CONRADIANA

The distinction cuts deep; however most readers have ignored it: Owen Knowles and Gene Moore quote the sentence beginning “The conquest of the earth” and Conrad’s statement that the Congo represented human history’s “vilest scramble for loot” to comment respectively on how Conrad “could write of colonialism” and describe “African colonialism” (67). But for Conrad, conquering and simply taking away did not de- scribe colonialism—a territory has to be settled (colonized) before it can become a colony; and so he has Marlow begin by pointing out that the Romans who simply conquered Britain “were no colonists” (“Heart” 50). Even so, David Daiches would also have us believe that what Mar- low understands the Romans to have done “is by implication applicable to all exploring colonizers” (13). Marlow points out that the Romans he specifically refers to were merely invaders and not empire builders (44): their “administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more” (“Heart” 50, emphasis added). Nineteen hundred years ago, the Romans set up nothing, but merely “grabbed what they could get for the sake of what could be got” (“Heart” 57). We may feel that the distinctions Conrad has Marlow make remain spurious, but we should be clear, as most critics are not, regarding the differences he has Marlow identify. It is not be- tween (praiseworthy) British and (unredeemed) Roman imperialism, but between imperialism and robbery on a grand scale. Marlow’s opening remarks are intended first and foremost as a straightforward, unambiguous, clear and unequivocal attack on the con- quest of the weak by the strong. That is what Marlow says happened nineteen hundred years ago in Britain and what he is about to show us is occurring in the Congo Free State. By confusing the very distinctions Marlow makes—mere conquest from imperialism and colonization and the idea behind imperialism from sentimental pretence—we continue to misread the whole of “Heart of Darkness” as depicting “an imperialist situation that is insane and nightmarish,” situated within a novel that aims to show that “imperialism’s norms and standards are bizarre” (Parry 24). King Leopold’s venture in the Congo was not and did not represent for Conrad or his narrator an imperialist or colonial situation. The Bel- gian Congo was indeed “a colony controlled by the Belgian Parliament,” but neither Conrad, Kurtz, nor Marlow ever travelled to the Belgian Congo, since the Belgian Congo “was established by the Belgian Par- liament” in 1908, fully nine years after “Heart of Darkness” appeared and eighteen years after Conrad returned from Africa (“Congo Free State” 534–5; “Belgian Congo” 60). It was set up “to replace the previous, WHITEANDFINSTON— The Two River Narratives 25 privately owned Congo Free State” (“Belgian Congo” 60). The abuses occurring within the Congo Free State are the ones Conrad witnessed and then depicted in “Heart of Darkness.” Taking the opening remarks aboard the Nellie as our starting point, as a kind of statement of epic argument, we may distinguish most of the major themes and concerns that appear throughout Marlow’s narrative. Robbery With Violence on a Grand Scale: These kinds of conquests are what the novel attacks. They involve one group of people or a nation in- vading and exploiting another, weaker people, along with their land and its resources. In so doing, the conquerors do nothing more than take their lives and liberties from people and grab what they can from their land without giving anything back. These conquerors are represented in the novella by the Romans who invaded Britain nineteen hundred years ago and the white men along the big river, described by Marlow, who has seen “the devil of violence” and “of greed,” as extraordinarily “lusty, red-eyed devils” (“Heart” 65). The Belgian Free State represented for Conrad, and he represented it in his novel, as “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience,” and we should not presume that the novel’s exposure of such vile greed implies an attack on something more than that (“Geography” 17). Robbery and violence on a less grand scale defines Kurtz’s enter- prises at the point where he keeps sending back ivory even though his outpost is “bare of goods and stores” (“Heart” 90). The decisive turning point, the tragic climax of Kurtz’s career hinges on what for Conrad was the crucial distinction between “the desire of trade or the desire of loot, [often] disguised in more or less fine words” (“Geography” 10). Accord- ing to an 1885 decree, the natives of the Congo “were not merely de- barred in theory from trading at all, but Trade, actual and potential, was swept out of existence” (Morel, Congo 16). Specifically, there was “no trade in the Upper Congo” where Conrad voyaged, since ninety-nine percent of “the products of the soil throughout the territories above Leopoldville” had been decreed to be “State Property” (Morel, Congo 97). However the situation along the Kasai was quite different, since the exploitation of the Kasai region began later. As we’ve seen, in 1888, Delcommune could still observe the natives trading in ivory (242). Then in 1891 “the Kasai region was [declared] exempt” from the priva- tizing decrees of King Leopold and “was left open [. . .] to free trade,” and the “Sovereign of the Congo State [. . .] consented to permit the exer- cise of legitimate commerce in [this] one portion” (Morel, Congo 94, 75, emphasis original); and it was not until 1902, three years after “Heart of 26 CONRADIANA

Darkness” first appeared in print, that the Kasai district was closed to free trade. Conrad set Kurtz’s station in a free trade zone three hundred miles from territory taken over by the Belgians. That is why the Russian is free to bring in “some cheap things and a few guns” gotten from a Dutchman and to send back “one small lot of ivory [. . .], so that he can’t call me a little thief” (“Heart” 124). Note also that when the Russian runs out of goods to trade he doesn’t turn into a thief as Kurtz does when faced with a similar situation, but acquires more ivory from a village chief in return for the fact that he “used to shoot game for them” (“Heart” 128). These are indications by contrast of the kind of friendly exchange of goods and services absent elsewhere in Africa. Conrad sends Kurtz up the Kasai with no armed forces accompany- ing him to show that the man originally intended to engage in fair trade with the natives; and having done so he becomes “chief of the best sta- tion” (“Heart” 79). His initial success can be compared with that of Stein, a “wealthy and respected merchant,” who had “a lot of trading posts es- tablished in the most out-of-the-way places” (Lord 202). The respect both men achieve as traders is compared in both works with the practices of men like Rajah Allang, who could have been modeled after King Leopold, since his “cruelty and rapacity had [. . .] no bounds” and he “pretended to be the only trader in his country [. . .], but his idea of trading was indistinguishable from the commonest forms of robbery” (Lord 257). In its 1910 edition, the Encyclopedia Britannica reported, “Exports [from the Congo] greatly exceed imports in value. ... This is due in large measure to the system of forced labour instituted by the state” (“The Congo Free State” 926). Years before, “Heart of Darkness” docu- mented the same trade imbalance: “a stream of [. . .] rubbishy cottons, beads, and brass wire sent into the depths of darkness, and in return came precious trickle of ivory” (68, emphasis added); and the novella re- vealed as well the kind of forced labor needed to maintain that imbal- ance.1 As to the brass wire Conrad mentions, it too was of no trade value. Though the natives, lacking metallurgy, were paid with “pieces of brass wire,” the amount was determined by the Belgian agents; and the natives had to take the brass even after they had enough and it was therefore of no value to them (Morel, Congo 60). Indeed, Conrad shows in his own way that the brass the Europeans give to the natives is of no use to them. The men on the company boat “earn every week three pieces of brass wire” to “buy their provisions,” but the “currency” paid WHITEANDFINSTON— The Two River Narratives 27 to them turns out to be worthless, since they are unable to reach any vil- lages to trade the brass for food and must survive on “rotten” hippo- meat (“Heart” 104, 94). By comparison the Russian also gives the natives “some cheap things,” but by contrast he receives in exchange something of equivalent value, “one small lot of ivory” (“Heart” 124, emphasis added). Compare also “An Outpost of Progress” where in “consequence of that friend- ship” which develops between the station agents and the village chief, the women of the village bring “every morning to the station, fowls, and sweet potatoes, and palm wine, and sometimes a goat” and nurse the agents “with gentle devotion” when they get sick (96). However, things start to fall apart once the company men begin to engage in “[n]o regular trade” (“Outpost” 96). Natives are sold into slavery in exchange for ivory: “No trade, no entry in books; all correct,” Makola informs the Eu- ropeans (“Outpost” 103). When Kurtz sends his shipment of ivory downriver, we know he in- tended at that point to engage in “regular trade” because this shipment is accompanied with an invoice listing the goods he has acquired (“Heart” 90). No invoice, no entry in any book will be found among the ivory he will eventually steal on his raids. Equally significant is the fact that, as we shall see, the company manager never compensates Kurtz or the natives for the ivory listed on the invoice. Marlow believes he is going to work for “a Company for trade on that river,” but before he gets to that river, he discovers what other Euro- peans did not realize or wish to acknowledge, that there was no trade occurring along the Congo River; and once he arrives at the Inner Sta- tion, Marlow discovers that trade has ceased along that other river as well (“Heart” 52). By the time Marlow meets him, Kurtz has been in decline for over a year, but not ultimately for the reason that the natives or the climate get to him. Kurtz’s downfall began before he took ill. It was initiated by con- scious decisions he made at the military post located three hundred miles from his station. However those decisions were forced upon him by the company manager who had managed to undermine his commer- cial enterprise. Watts has pointed out the ways in which the manager “hopes to destroy Kurtz, his main rival for promotion, by delaying relief of the inner station until Kurtz has become mortally ill” (“Notes” 106); but we should add that apparently the manager first went after Kurtz by ruining his business. “Heart of Darkness” expands on the situation described in “Outpost 28 CONRADIANA of Progress,” where, as we’ve seen, that outpost is running out of sup- plies because “one of the Company’s steamers had been wrecked” and the “the Director was busy with the other, relieving distant and impor- tant stations on the main river” (“Outpost” 109). In the novella, how- ever, there is no more important station than Kurtz’s. Kurtz is “the best agent” and his is simply “the best station” (“Heart” 75, 79). Why is it then that no one really knows how to navigate upriver to get there, as if this “very important station” had been built on “an unknown planet” (“Heart” 75, 95)? Why is it that the company, with several captains other than Fresleven in its employ, can just as well hire a man like Marlow with no fresh water experience to make the trip and then can provide him with no charts or other navigational information (“Heart” 53)?— unless none of the company’s riverboat captains has ever made the trip to re-supply the Inner Station with the goods Kurtz needs to continue trading with the natives. Even after Kurtz sends “Ivory, [. . .] lots of it— prime sort” downriver, no company boat is sent upriver to re-supply him (“Heart” 90). Knowing that the company was not providing Kurtz with the transportation he requires to move goods up and down river, the uncle asks his nephew, the company manager, “‘How did that ivory come all this way?’” and is told that it was shipped using only “a fleet of canoes in charge of a [. . .] clerk” (“Heart” 90). That is why Marlow’s tin- pot steamer is the first company vessel to voyage into the unfamiliar ter- ritory where Kurtz’s Inner Station is located. We should note however that although the boat has enough capacity to “save” the “remarkable quantity of ivory” Kurtz has acquired by raiding the country—“Heaps of it, stacks of it [. . .]. You would think there was not a single tusk left ei- ther above or below the ground in the whole country,” it nevertheless has brought no goods upriver (“Heart” 137, 115). Earlier, when waiting at the Central Station, Marlow can see “ivory coming out,” but he does not report seeing any goods going in (“Heart” 81). The district round the Inner Station will be closed to trade, but not, we might presume, to fur- ther raids, since the situation there has come to reflect what occurred throughout Leopold’s Congo and what after 1902 would happen in the Kasai valley region as well: Precious goods are being taken out of the re- gion without any coming in to redeem what had been taken out (“Heart” 137). In 1884, the manifesto of the International African Association stated that the purpose of the Association was to “‘civilise Africa by encour- agement given to legitimate trade’” (qtd. in Morel, Rubber 16). In that same year Bismarck also claimed that all “Governments [. . .] share the WHITEANDFINSTON— The Two River Narratives 29 desire of civilising the natives of Africa by opening the interior of that Continent to trade” (qtd. in Morel, Rubber 18). Exposing the lies behind these so-called trade associations, Morel maintained that “it is the duty of the British Government [. . .] to uphold the principle of trade in the African tropics” (Rubber 205). Sharing the same concerns over “the com- mercial policy and the administrative methods of the Congo State” that Morel would later document, Conrad marked Kurtz’s downfall by hav- ing him fail to uphold the principle of fair trade that defined impe- rialism’s legitimate commercial aims (CL 3: 95). The “poor chap” was not only duped into believing that Europeans were honestly intent on bringing light and civilization to darkest Africa by means of fair and free trade (“Heart” 51); but once he had succeeded in establishing a commercial relationship with the natives, his success, like that of Jim in Patusan or Gould in Costaguana, was destroyed by ruthless and greedy men. With a station allowed to become bare of goods and stores, Kurtz is forced to decide either to seek relief from the Company Station or else abandon his outpost and his work. He does neither. Kurtz’s tragic mistake occurs when he decides instead to turn his back “on the headquarters, on relief, on thoughts of home” and to re- turn to his “empty [. . .] station” and begin what Conrad identified in “Outpost” as “[n]o regular trade” (“Heart” 90; “Outpost” 96). It is as if Stein, having established profitable trading posts among the natives, were to suddenly decide to start robbing them just like Rajah Allang or if the Russian were to somehow force the natives to exchange precious rather than small lots of ivory for the cheap goods he brings. The turning point in Kurtz’s career, in his plans, in his life and sanity, is arrived at the moment he decides to abandon his trade relationship with the natives and to continue acquiring ivory from them by raiding the country (“Heart” 128). Benita Parry believes that “Kurtz is exorbitant and grotesque be- cause of the excesses rather than the essence of his conduct […],” which impersonate “imperialism’s will to expand its domain over the earth and all its creatures” (29). However, we should never forget that as noted above the Belgians were not imperialists: “Practically the whole of the [Congo Free] State [not to be confused with the Belgian Congo] was regarded as the private possession of the King of the Belgians [. . .]”; and there was “no opening for commerce” (Morel, Congo 98, 97). Conrad therefore quite pointedly has Kurtz impersonate the policies of the Bel- gians not by becoming excessive in his conduct, but by transforming himself essentially from an imperialist and would-be humanitarian 30 CONRADIANA

willing to trade with the natives (what King Leopold pretended to be) into a thief (what Leopold actually was). Kurtz ends up doing on a smaller scale exactly what the Romans did when they invaded Britain and the Belgians were doing in their con- quest of the Congo: he takes without redeeming. The redeeming idea that is lacking here should not be understood primarily in the sense of religious or moral redemption, but in economic terms: Kurtz steals with- out trading any goods or services in return for what he has taken; and his conduct thereby reflects the very essence of what the Belgians were doing, for Africans were complaining that the Congo “State [. . .] had taken their country without remuneration [. . .]. State rule in no way benefited the native” (Morel, Congo 88). Colonialism and Imperialism: This is the idea that redeems the con- quest of the earth, an undeniably often brutal undertaking that is in ob- vious need of redemption. What redeems conquest, what according to Marlow makes amends for it, is that the initial raiders are often followed or replaced by those who will set up an administrative system of gover- nance, settle the territory, establish trade and give something of their civilization, its goods, services, and even some of its principles, in return for what they take. “Heart of Darkness” is no attack on imperialism or colonialism because it quite simply reveals the Belgians to be doing none of these things in the Congo. They were motivated solely by “the desire of loot” and “nothing more”(“Geography” 10; “Heart” 50). For this reason, the novella begins by noting that the “seed of common- wealths, the germ of empires” that had sailed from London was not what was being shipped out of Antwerp (“Heart” 47). Yet critics persist, one way or another, in interpreting the novella as an attack on—or even defense of—imperialism. Burden, for example, contends that “it is perhaps [. . .] badly managed imperialism that Mar- low objects to” (26). What “angers him most is the inefficiency of the Bel- gian administration. Nothing can match British colonial rule; as we all know, they treat their natives better than anyone else!” (Burden 79). Parry finds that “Heart of Darkness is ultimately a public disavowal of imperialism’s authorised lies” (28). However, Conrad understood that, if efficiently and effectively carried out, imperialism can be redeemed and would therefore not have to be based on lies. Recall that it was not trade but looting which, he said, needed to be “disguised in more or less fine words” (“Geography” 10). Thus the difference Marlow sees be- tween invasion and colonization hasn’t to do with efficiency, but with the fact that invasion and conquest are typically inflicted on weaker WHITEANDFINSTON— The Two River Narratives 31 people without any idea of giving back anything for what has been taken. Unquestionably, England “has been one of the dark places of the earth,” but Marlow points out that he was “thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came,” not the subsequent history the first narra- tor referred to because indeed, as he acknowledges, “Light came out of this river since” (“Heart” 49). So whatever violence the Romans em- ployed in their conquest of England, they did eventually back it up not with “a sentimental pretence,” but with “an idea—something you can set up” (“Heart” 51). They made England part of their empire and set up roads, aqueducts, sewage systems, city planning, along with Chris- tianity, the rule of law, and so on to the point where hundreds of years later one could and still can see many of those “idea[s]” still standing in “Roman Britain” (“Heart” 51). England might very well have remained the dark place Marlow tells us it once was had the Romans merely plundered and despoiled the countries they invaded. One cannot imagine an African civilization de- veloping out of Leopold’s conquest, a future place where some African sitting on the deck of a yacht moored on the Congo could announce that his country had once been a dark place. One cannot imagine that be- cause the white men who invaded the Congo had no idea behind their conquest other than personal profit. Despite numerous authorized lies, their conquest had “no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe” (“Heart” 87). The Congo Free State of the late nineteenth century, is a “country,” Morel noted, that “is not being developed in the interest of the people of the land” (Rubber 135): The Central Station is littered with “pieces of de- caying machinery”—rusty nails, a railway truck turned upside down and a nearby ravine is filled with broken drainage-pipes lying in a “wanton smash-up” because Conrad knew that the Belgians had no in- terest in leaving anything of durable value for the Africans (“Heart” 63–4, 65–6). Morel made quite clear what Conrad had dramatized in his novella, that the “‘Congo State’ is naught but a collection of individuals [. . .] working for their own selfish ends, caring nothing for posterity, [. . .] indifferent of the future, [. . .] animated by no fanaticism other than the fanaticism of dividends” (King 265). Or, as Marlow reminds his aunt when she speaks of the great mission of those Europeans working in Africa, “the Company was run for profit” (“Heart” 59). In Nostromo Conrad did dramatize a true colonial situation, which should help us recognize how significantly different those conditions 32 CONRADIANA are from what he depicted in “Heart of Darkness”: numerous individu- als from England, Italy and France colonize Costaguana, which is to say, they come to live and raise families, to invest in the country and not just take resources out, to employ natives as laborers rather than slaves, to set up and secure various private and public institutions, and to partici- pate in political affairs. In the very year that Conrad steamed up the Congo, Anton Chekhov wrote to A. S. Souvorin on 9 December 1890: “The Englishman exploits Chinese, sepoys, Hindus, but then he gives them roads, aqueducts, museums, Christianity; you [Russians] too ex- ploit, but what do you give?” (169). In other words, the British redeem their exploitation; and for this reason Marlow finds the British imperial presence “good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is [being] done” (“Heart” 55). Whether it succeeds or fails, whether a foolish hope or realistic plan, the imperial idea, as Conrad un- derstood it, holds that strong nations may redeem their conquest of weaker people by doing real work and hopefully giving something of real value in return for what they have taken. Sentimental Pretence: “Heart of Darkness” indicts conquest in the ab- sence of redemption (“merely a squeeze, and nothing more” [“Heart” 50]), and in its modern guise, conquest invested with pretensions to phi- lanthropy (“pretty fictions” [Kimbrough 10n]). The Belgians lied precisely because they had no imperialist plan to improve the lives of Africans, and “Heart of Darkness” expresses at greater length and in more detail what Conrad said he sought to reveal about the Congo in “An Outpost of Progress”: “all my indignation at masquerading philanthropy” (CL 1: 294). What Conrad identified as “philanthropic pretence” is employed by those who desire nothing more than to earn percentages as a means to cover up their grand scale robbery, and these authorized lies are all too readily accepted by the general population within the conquering na- tions who talk glibly of “weaning those ignorant millions away from their horrid ways” (“Heart” 78, 59). Even exceptional individuals like Kurtz easily became duped by these sentiments. Morbid Conscience: If those parts of the novella along the big river at- tack grand scale violence and the sentimental pretences that serve to dis- guise it, Marlow’s voyage into the heart of darkness confronts horror of a different sort. The useless and destructive effects of a morbid conscience is the one theme not introduced in the prologue on the Nellie because the men we first meet working along the big river are not motivated by morbid conscience. That theme does not appear until much later when the nar- WHITEANDFINSTON— The Two River Narratives 33 rative moves on to depict Kurtz’s moral and mental decay, and if we re- call the letters Conrad wrote while composing “Heart of Darkness” (quoted above), we might suppose that he did not give voice to that theme when working on the Nellie episode because the story was not originally going to contain these “secondary notions” (CL 2: 157). In A Personal Record Conrad effectively elaborated on Marlow’s dis- tinction between sound, lasting principles and the kind of crazy ideas that eventually drive Kurtz mad:

An impartial view of humanity in all its degrees of splendour and misery together with a special regard for the right of the unprivileged of this earth, not on any mystic ground but on the ground of simple fellowship and honourable reciprocity of services, was the dominant characteristic of the mental and moral atmosphere of the houses which sheltered my hazardous childhood:—matters of calm and deep conviction both lasting and consistent, and removed as far as possible from that humanitarian- ism that seems to be merely a matter of crazy nerves or a morbid con- science. (vii)

Kurtz travels to Africa not motivated by calm and deep moral con- viction, but driven by a hollow humanitarianism arising from crazy nerves or a morbid conscience. It is not imperialism’s redeeming idea that he finds appealing either, but those authorized philanthropic lies Leopold spread throughout Europe, sentimental pretences which, even if honestly pursued, cannot possibly provide any practical or substantial benefits for the natives. That is how all of Europe went into the making and finally the tragedy of Kurtz. That tragedy is set in motion when Kurtz back in Europe came to be- lieve in what the brick maker calls “pity, and science, and progress, and the devil knows what else” (“Heart” 79). He believes the cause entrusted to him by Europe is, as the brick maker puts it, “so to speak, higher intel- ligence, wide sympathies, a singleness of purpose” (“Heart” 79). Lots of people, he tells Marlow, say that and some “even write that; and so he comes here” (“Heart” 79). The aim of organizations like the Eldorado Exploring Expedition is clear: to “tear treasure out of the bowels of the land” (“Heart” 87). Though Kurtz, unlike these people, “had come out equipped with moral ideas,” it remains unclear what they entail (“Heart” 88). It is certainly not clear to the brick maker who can only say that they have to do “so speak” with higher intelligence and “the devil knows what else” (“Heart” 79). 34 CONRADIANA

And when Marlow reads Kurtz’s report for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, he discovers that it is certainly “ruled by an august Benevolence,” and filled with “altruistic sentiment,” and the “unbounded power of eloquence,” that speaks of exerting “a power for good practically unbounded,” but he finds that it contains “no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases” (“Heart” 118). Kurtz’s words not only sound good, but in fact they sound exactly like the very ideas Leopold managed to get most all of Europe to speak and write favorably about. As Marlow remarks, “There had been a lot of [. . .] rot let loose in print and talk just about that time” concerning emis- saries of light and lower sorts of apostles (“Heart” 59). Leopold for ex- ample communicated to the London Times that to “open to civilization the only part of the globe which it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which hangs over entire peoples, is [. . .] a crusade worthy of this century of progress,” and he managed to convince many that his ef- forts constituted what was then called “the greatest humanitarian work of this time” (qtd. in Hochschild 44, 46). Kurtz was someone certainly convinced by the rhetoric. The “poor chap” did not realize that the “commercial policy and the administrative methods” of the Belgians was “in every aspect an enormous and atro- cious lie” (“Heart” 51; CL 3: 95). He was of course able to convince others that he possessed the higher intelligence and singleness of purpose to achieve the great things he had read about back in Europe. However, the naive prodigy eventually discovers to his horror that he had been taken in by a lot of sentimental pretentiousness. One of Conrad’s letters to Cunninghame Graham, a man like Kurtz dedicated to improving the lot of humankind, pretty much captures Conrad’s attitude toward such high moral feelings:

You with your ideals of sincerity, courage and truth are strangely out of place in this epoch of material preoccupations. What does it bring? What’s the profit? What do we get by it? These questions are at the root of every moral, intellectual or political movement. Into the noblest causes men manage to put something of their baseness [. . .]. You seem to me tragic with your courage, with your beliefs and hopes. Every cause is tainted [. . .]. You are misguided by the desire of the impossible [. . .]. What you want to reform are not institutions—it is human nature [. . .]. But will You [sic] persuade humanity to throw away sword and shield? (CL 2: 25) WHITEANDFINSTON— The Two River Narratives 35

Finding men genuinely devoted to progress and enlightenment to be rather naïve and finally “tragic” in their “beliefs and hopes,” Conrad re- vealed in Lord Jim and Nostromo that, human nature being what it is, the improvement of a colonized country does not necessarily bring progress or enlightenment (CL 2: 25). Men simply continue to act in the same greedy and savage ways under supposedly better political or economic conditions. Not that the lives of the Africans in the Congo are in anyway improved by their European conquerors, but Kurtz’s postscript, “‘Exter- minate the brutes!’” should not be seen as a call for genocide, but prima- rily as an expression of his frustration over the fact that he cannot “reform [. . .] human nature” and realizes that he had been inspired by ideas of enlightenment and progress which many others at the time were already coming to believe had no future (“Heart” 118; CL 2: 25). As Conrad wrote, “Man is a vicious animal [. . .]. Society is fundamentally criminal [. . .]. That is why I respect the extreme anarchists.-‘I hope for general extermination’ [. . .]. I am allowed nothing but fidelity to an ab- solutely lost cause, to an idea without a future” (CL 2: 160–1). Marlow re- mains “loyal to Kurtz” because in part, in his moment of anagnorisis, the man recognizes the same horrible truths regarding man and society, ide- alism and the future, that the author, after he returned from Africa, would continue to give expression to throughout his writings (“Heart” 151). Kurtz’s admirers back in Europe know next to nothing about Africa or what the man does there and therefore his “success in Europe is as- sured,” but those who actually work in the Congo find nothing substan- tial or practical in Kurtz’s misguided ideas regarding progress and enlightenment (“Heart” 143). Their low opinion of the man along with his ideas and methods is pretty much confirmed when Marlow finally does hear Kurtz speak, since he can tell him nothing more than that he “had immense plans,” and “was on the threshold of great things” (“Heart” 143). Even Kurtz’s most fanatically devoted disciple cannot ex- press exactly what he thinks the great man’s words mean: “‘We talked of everything,’” he said [. . .]. ‘Everything! Everything! [. . .] It was in general. He made me see things—things’” (“Heart” 127). Kurtz and the Russian talked about “everything,” about “things,” or, in the words of the brick maker, they talked so to speak, about “the devil knows what” (“Heart” 79). Kurtz hasn’t the foggiest idea what he might actually do to improve the lives of the Africans. He came with moral ideas, but as Marlow puts it, with “moral ideas of some sort”; and like his ideas, Kurtz was, as Marlow concludes, “hollow at the core” (“Heart” 88, 131). 36 CONRADIANA

Where the tragedy along the big river results from terrible greed, Kurtz, on the other hand, evidences no serious economic interest in going to the Congo. In fact Kurtz speaks of trade with only passing interest at best, imagining above all else that each “station should be a beacon on the road towards better things, a centre for trade of course, but also for humanizing, improving, instructing” (“Heart” 91). He ap- parently used the company merely as a means of getting to Africa, and then out of carelessness for the economic consequences of his actions he simply and unwisely “ruined the district” and did “more harm than good to the Company” (“Heart” 131, 137). Even as he is dying, Kurtz re- mains troubled with one failure and no others: “I’ll carry my ideas out yet,” he tells Marlow (“Heart” 137). Like Lord Jim, Kurtz has a “contemptibly childish” wish to attain a great reputation (“Heart” 148). He desires “to have kings meet him at railway-stations on his return” (“Heart” 148). Had he gone to Africa with something more than a morbid conscience aroused by useless sen- timents, had his purpose been inspired by the kind of “idea [. . .] you can set up,” had he come as an imperialist with a sound and efficient eco- nomic plan seeking to set up an honorable, reciprocal economic arrange- ment involving the trading of goods and services, then Kurtz in the end might have actually improved the lives of the natives (“Heart” 51). He could have left a road or an aqueduct. That would have been the honor- able thing to do, and it might have redeemed him. Unfortunately, “Mr. Kurtz’s knowledge, however, extensive, did not bear upon the problems of commerce or administration” (“Heart” 153); and he leaves only a painting and an incomplete pamphlet, neither of which could be of any use to the natives. The appropriate response to economic exploitation is not to instruct the exploited with respect to their savage ways. Kurtz targets the wrong people for the wrong reasons. If anyone requires improvement, it is the Europeans plundering Africa and not the natives they victimize. Short of liberation from one’s oppressors, the most direct and effective way to eradicate the kind of exploitation we witness in the first parts of the novella is not through pity and progress and not by trying to convert Africans from savage customs, but to engage in honest trade with the people others have been exploiting. “Heart of Darkness” ranges over the entire history of Western civi- lization with respect to the relationship between exploration, conquest, looting and colonizing: It tells us that from ancient to modern times, na- tions and peoples explored the earth, and Conrad believed or said he be- WHITEANDFINSTON— The Two River Narratives 37 lieved that many of these explorers were men whose “only object was the search for truth” and “whose purity of intention gave them a heroic dimension” (“Geography” 10). As a boy, he had imagined Africa to be a place of “worthy, adventurous and devoted men” who were “conquer- ing a bit of truth here and a bit of truth there” (“Geography” 13); and as an adult he looked forward to exploring and searching for truth along the Kasai River and would write of the young Marlow losing himself “in all the glories of exploration” (“Heart” 52). Unfortunately both men found themselves in quite different situa- tions among far less worthy men. The truth they discovered was that, re- gardless of its worthy intent, geographical exploration, that Conrad characterized as “the most blameless of sciences,” typically leads to the “conquest of the earth” (“Geography” 3). Conquerors, “prompted by an acquisitive spirit, the idea of lucre in some form,” then either loot the land they have conquered or establish empires and colonies through which lucre is acquired by means of (possibly fair) trade (“Geogra- phy”10). Largely or entirely absent from previous epochs were the peculiarly modern ideas of progress and enlightenment; and after the novella ex- amines the history and consequences of exploration, conquest, empires or looting, the focus shifts in the upriver sections to question modern man’s hopes for progress in light of what history has already revealed. In modern times we find for the first time men like Kurtz genuinely de- voted to the idea of progress, but also those still motivated by an acquisi- tive spirit who must now disguise their acquisitive interests with “fine words” and “pretty fictions” (“Geography” 10; Kimbrough 10n). Conrad’s views on all these matters would appear to have been a lot less ironic and uncertain than so many contemporary critics would have us believe. He admired and idealized those explorers who in his view sought truth untainted by any acquisitive spirit, and as much as he wor- ried about the unrestrained greed of men, he felt that the desire for riches could be redeemed if it resulted in mutually beneficial trade which colonial and imperial powers could establish round the globe if they were prepared to institute and maintain sound and fair commercial policies and administrative methods. What he utterly abhorred was riches acquired by simply looting people and their land, a looting ac- companied in modern times with sentimental pretences used to disguise the greed and violence that persisted in an age that presumed itself to be more civilized than any in human history. Accordingly, “Heart of Dark- ness” reveals on both a grand and personal scale what happens when 38 CONRADIANA

there is no maintenance of that “honourable reciprocity of services” which Conrad claimed characterized the “moral atmosphere” of the houses in which he was raised (Personal vii). The abandonment of those principles lies at the heart of the darkness that overtook Africa after the white men conquered it. Darkness of another sort overtakes Kurtz. With those famous final words, “The horror! The horror!,” Marlow believes Kurtz arrived at “a form of ultimate wisdom” that “life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be” (“Heart” 149, 150–1). It is wisdom “wide enough to em- brace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness” (“Heart” 150). As such it is strikingly similar to Conrad’s pessimism regarding the impossibility of human progress within a darkening universe and may go a long way in explaining why Conrad has Marlow say he remains loyal to the man:

If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attainment of per- fection must end in cold, darkness and silence. In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, for knowledge [. . .] is only a vain sticking up for appearances [. . .]. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever [. . .]. Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore. (CL 2: 17)

The horrors Conrad revealed in the beginning of “Heart of Darkness” could be exposed only by taking his readers to the big river in Africa; but there was no need to voyage up that other river to view the horror, the kind of “cold” horror Kurtz confronts (CL 2: 17). Marvelous as the upriver journey is, it remains over-extended. The wonderful impressions are piled on so thickly for so long that we tend to become distracted from the themes and images of conquest, looting, greed, and brutality presented so clearly before Marlow voyages into fog and darkness. We tend to for- get that the Romans conquered and plundered with equally brutal force in more temperate zones or that the brutality carried out in the jungles of Africa was conceived, planned, and legalized in those same temperate regions by men of European civilization most of whom had never been to darkest Africa and none of whom thought of enslaving and slaughtering the natives because they were somehow adversely affected by the savage customs or oppressive climate of sub-Saharan Africa. The adjectival insistence with which Conrad envisions Marlow’s up- river journey, his over-indulgence in lengthy descriptive passages, sets somewhat the wrong scene for the narrative that is unfolding, or per- WHITEANDFINSTON— The Two River Narratives 39 haps more correctly, presents the background so vividly that we tend not to see as clearly as we should the characters and their stories that are or should be unfolding before us. We have thus come to presume from the wonderful upriver scenes that the jungle and the savagery of Africa is largely responsible for getting the better of Kurtz when in fact Conrad showed, in line with his themes regarding trade, conquest, and looting, that the fateful decisions Kurtz makes reflect what the Europeans and not the natives were doing in Africa. Not Africa, but all of Europe went into the making of Kurtz; yet Conrad does not have us meet him in Europe, but after he has left it, and thus we often fail to realize that the Africa he visits for a relatively brief time in his life really had little to do with the significant changes that occurred in him. In fact the horror of which Kurtz speaks could be seen from just about anywhere, like for example from a yacht moored on the Thames where the first narrator, who appears never to have been to the Congo, is still able to recognize the same horror Kurtz discovered and to do so without having committed innumerable crimes. He can look out on that river far from equatorial Africa and feel that, like that other river Mar- low traveled on, it too “seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness” (“Heart” 162). In other words, Conrad didn’t have to stage Kurtz’s decline in an African setting. He might have had Kurtz voyage to Victorian England instead, and instead of participating in savage rites he might better have read The Origin of the Species which denied any faith or belief in providen- tial design at the beginning of creation, or maybe he might have looked into the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a theory wide enough to em- brace the entire universe at the end of time when it all must end in cold, darkness, and silence. He might have exposed himself to the dark and pessimistic writings of Arnold or Hardy or even Dostoyevsky.3 The hor- ror Conrad finally had Kurtz give expression to was typical of the kind of fin de siècle disillusionment common among intellectuals and literati in Europe. That also is how all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz. The misery and spiritual malaise that oppressed these Europeans was something quite different from the horrors suffered by the people of Africa. What finally makes the upriver narrative objectionable is not sim- ply that innumerable Africans pay a very high price for one European’s moral victory, but that they suffer needlessly, even carelessly on Conrad’s part so that Kurtz might gain wisdom irrelevant to the very palpable hor- rors Africans were suffering at the hands of their European conquerors. If there is a problem here, it is that Kurtz’s hopes and disappoint- 40 CONRADIANA ments are not particularly relevant to events that the first parts of the novella revealed to be occurring in the Congo, nor are they relevant to the natives whom Kurtz encountered. His mental breakdown has no particular regional or even racial significance, but represents that feeling of “utter solitude” in a foreign land among people whose language and customs are not native to him that the depressive and nervous author continued to experience and write about well after he had settled in En- gland (“Heart” 116). When “at sea,” Conrad “never felt lonely” because he “never lacked company”; but when he arrived at Stanley Falls he “felt very lonely there” (“Geography” 17); and that feeling no doubt entered his charac- terization of Kurtz in the Congo. Yet, Conrad showed that even Yanko Goorall in “Amy Foster” is no more successful at adapting to the ways of other whites in England than Kurtz is to the blacks in Africa. Kurtz’s breakdown typifies the kind of loneliness and despair that strikes a number of Conrad’s European characters who live, as Conrad did, far from their native countries and who like the Frenchman, Martin De- coud, in South America, die “from solitude and want of faith in himself and others” or like the Russian, Kirylo Sidorovitch Razumov who in Switzerland experiences the “naked terror” of “true loneliness,” a “moral solitude” that no human being could bear “without going mad” (Nos- tromo 496; Under 39). The problem, or better put, the source of the problem is not that Conrad was a racist who dehumanized Africans, as Achebe has charged, but that once Marlow begins steaming upriver, Conrad pretty much effectively abandoned the people of Africa and his memories of the horrors he witnessed there to take us on a journey into a dark universe that the writer would continue to explore long after he had left Africa and its people. It is a universe vividly imagined, but which should not be mis- taken for or confused with the real Africa or the actual river Conrad knew and depicted in the first sections of “Heart of Darkness.”

NOTES

1. See Conrad’s The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad: Volume 3, 1903–1907, pages 95–7, quoted in part above, for Conrad’s outrage at England and Europe tolerating slavery in the Congo. 2. We consulted their map from 1909, rpt. by Kroll Map Co., Seattle, 2002. 3. In fact, when “Heart of Darkness” first appeared, Edward Garnett com- pared it to Crime and Punishment (164). WHITEANDFINSTON— The Two River Narratives 41

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