Who Put Kurtz on the Congo?

Abstract

Who Put Kurtz on the Congo? Harry White (bio) and Irving L. Finston (bio) 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 generally assumed. We now ask how one of the most important, influential, and widely read and studied works of modern fiction has been so consistently and unquestioningly misread for so long on such a basic level. In what follows we show that something akin to a cover-up was initiated by the author regarding the location and direction of Charlie Mar-low'sc 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 Stanley 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 misunderstanding arose in large part from the fact that Conrad was anything 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 either Blackwood or the British reading public. The "voyage Conrad outlines 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 subject of much adventure and controversy, as the doctor who examines [End Page 81] 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 compromised; 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 refute any claim that Marlow was supposedly traveling up the Congo, since the river and its environs which...