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Who Put Kurtz on the Congo? Harry White, Irving L Who Put Kurtz on the Congo? Harry White, Irving L. Finston Conradiana, Volume 42, Number 1-2, Spring/Summer 2010, pp. 81-92 (Article) Published by Texas Tech University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cnd.2010.0010 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/452495 Access provided at 9 Oct 2019 05:10 GMT from USP-Universidade de São Paulo Who Put Kurtz on the Congo? HARRYWHITEANDIRVINGL.FINSTON Our article included in this issue, “The Two River Narratives in ‘Heart of Darkness,’” showed that Joseph Conrad imagined Kurtz’s Inner Station to be located on the Kasai River and not on the Congo as has been gener- ally assumed. We now ask how one of the most important, influential, and widely read and studied works of modern fiction has been so con- sistently and unquestioningly misread for so long on such a basic level. In what follows we show that something akin to a cover-up was initi- ated by the author regarding the location and direction of Charlie Mar- low’s voyage. We will then reveal the primary source for many of the current interpretations and misinterpretations of “Heart of Darkness” by showing how one very influential scholar was the first to place Kurtz’s station on the wrong river. Nowhere in any of his writings did Conrad report that Marlow’s venture into the heart of darkness followed his own voyage from Stan- ley Pool to Stanley Falls. Nowhere in “Heart of Darkness” does it say that Marlow voyages up the Congo to find Kurtz. Yet critics and scholars have persisted in placing Kurtz’s Inner Station on the Congo. This mis- understanding arose in large part from the fact that Conrad was any- thing but forthcoming about the direction of Marlow’s voyage. He was informative when he noted for his publisher that “An Outpost of Progress” took place alongside the Kasai, but withheld the name of the river when writing to his other publisher about “Heart of Darkness” (CL 1: 294; CL 2: 139). Conrad kept from William Blackwood what he revealed to Thomas Fisher Unwin, that the narrative he hoped to have published took place on and alongside the Kasai River (we use the usual spelling and not Conrad’s). After all, the Kasai would not likely have been known to ei- ther Blackwood or the British reading public. The “voyage Conrad out- lines in his novella would have already been familiar to Victorian readers” only if his readers were to presume that the voyage he outlined takes place on the Congo (Griffith 23). The Congo after all was the sub- ject of much adventure and controversy, as the doctor who examines Conradiana, vol. 42, no. 1–2, 2010 © Texas Tech University Press 82 CONRADIANA Marlow remarks: “‘So you are going out there.’ Famous. Interesting, too” (“Heart” 58). However, as Alexandre Delcommune observed two years before Conrad arrived in the Congo: “It is [. .] scarcely six years since it [the Kasai] has been known” (221, translation White). Readers could very well have found Marlow’s voyage much less interesting if they realized that it took place along a scarcely known river rather than a very famous one. There was a related problem. Conrad also informed Blackwood that his story dealt with a “subject [that] is of our time distinc[t]ly” (CL 2: 140); so if he were to be as precise and explicit about the direction of Marlow’s voyage as he was about his own, readers might realize that the central episode in this work of fiction described a river journey that took the narrator far from the Belgian exploitation of the Congo River and its environs. Then the timely subject of the novella might be seriously com- promised; and in the long run, “Heart of Darkness” might never have gained the reputation which it now enjoys of being “one of the most scathing indictments of imperialism in all literature” (Hochschild 146). We may gauge something of that concern by Conrad’s remarks to R. B. Cunninghame Graham, a man with strong political convictions who had already expressed interest in the timely subject of the first parts of the novella. Conrad noted that the upriver portions he was composing did not deal so distinctly with the political issues of the time (CL 2: 157). Lastly, if Conrad had identified the river in the novella as the Congo or somehow indicated that it was based on that river, then anyone familiar with seamanship or that particular stretch of waterway could readily re- fute any claim that Marlow was supposedly traveling up the Congo, since the river and its environs which are described in the novella hardly match the Upper Congo. That Conrad didn’t name the Congo is there- fore understandable; yet it remains curious that there is no written record anywhere that we can find indicating that he told anyone—nei- ther his publisher nor his friends and his wife who would write about him and his work—exactly where he did imagine Kurtz’s station to be located. We know that Conrad could be impatient with attempts to link his works to events in his life. He wrote Richard Curle regarding his eastern tales, such as “Youth”: “I knew what I was doing in leaving the facts of my life and even the tales in the background. Explicitness [. .] is fatal to the glamour of all artistic work, robbing it of all suggestiveness, destroy- ing all illusion” (CL 7: 457). Conrad could not have been very explicit when speaking with Curle about Marlow’s journey, since Curle’s 1914 WHITEANDFINSTON— Who Put Kurtz on the Congo? 83 book which received “Conrad’s authorization” states nothing more spe- cific than that Marlow “went [. .] [into]Africa[‘s] blind interior” (Joseph 51). However, when Curle prepared a list of the vessels on which the writer had traveled, Conrad did explicitly write “Heart of Darkness,” next to Roi des Belges (“Congo” 159); yet he was not equally explicit about writing the name of the river on which Marlow’s boat voyages. Curle or anyone else might naturally assume from what Conrad did (and didn’t) write that Marlow took his boat up the same river on which Conrad took the Roi des Belges. We suspect that Conrad knew very well what might prove fatal to the success of a work like “Heart of Darkness”; and, for that reason, when speaking with Curle or especially Gérard Jean-Aubry, he did not leave out the facts of his life along the Congo but kept the facts of Mar- low’s journey along the Kasai well in the background. Conrad appar- ently revealed and withheld certain information regarding his life and the tale taken from it not to make this particular work more glamorous, but to make it more interesting and timely by not robbing his readers of any illusion they might arrive at that Marlow’s adventures take place entirely alongside and then upon the famous Congo River; and as we shall see, at least since 1926, that is what most everyone has come to as- sume. Curle edited and published Conrad’s “Congo Diary,” noting numer- ous similarities between “Heart of Darkness” and the diary’s account of the author’s overland journey alongside the Congo; yet he refrained from printing Conrad’s “second notebook” (published much later by Zdizs`aw Najder as “Up-River Book, 1890”). Curle did not print it, he said, “simply because it has no personal or literary interest,” even though he acknowledged that it “played its special and impersonal part in the construction” of “the river journey in ‘Heart of Darkness’” (“Congo” 159). That fact, one would think, would certainly give it con- siderable “literary interest” regarding “the river journey in ‘Heart of Darkness’” (“Congo” 159); but it would not be information that would reveal the kind of comparisons Curle was able to find in the diary. To the contrary, if carefully regarded, the second notebook could reveal enough dissimilarities to suggest that the river journey in the novella was not constructed on the basis of Conrad’s voyage up the Congo. We cannot tell for certain if Conrad and those close to him were somehow involved in a cover-up. Yet it is certainly the case that every- thing written at the time by Conrad and those who spoke with him runs in the same direction: it is detailed and explicit with respect to Conrad’s 84 CONRADIANA and Marlow’s relation to the Congo River, but says or reveals nothing about the Kasai. We do know for certain that the author was not above inventing stories when for instance he needed to cover up his financial losses or not above submitting false information to advance his naval ca- reer (Najder, Joseph 70–1, 65–6). Secrecy and lies play an important part in quite a number of Conrad’s narratives, including “Heart of Dark- ness”; and Conrad might very well have advanced his writing career and sought to increase the sales of this one particular novella in a way that was not entirely truthful. Remember too that in an age that favored realistic fiction, an author’s reputation could generally depend on how true to life his work ap- peared. Curle wrote in 1926 that, “Conrad’s work was founded upon the promptings of memory [. .]. [T]he driving force behind his creation is reality” (“Congo” 156). A generation before, the first reviewers were also quick to establish the authenticity of the novella: Edward Garnett wrote, “‘Heart of Darkness’ [.
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