The Two River Narratives in Heart of Darkness

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
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The Two River Narratives in Heart of Darkness
H A R RY W H I T E A N D I RV I N G L . F I N S T O N
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.
W H I T E A N D F I N S T O N — 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
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
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,
“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.
Zdzisàw 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”
(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).
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
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
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
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
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-
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,
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
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
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
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-
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)
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-
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-
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).
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Joseph Conrad informed his readers that “‘Youth’ is a feat of memory”

steamer covered the thousand miles from Kinchasa to Stanley Falls in

Before Sherry’s work, critics regularly confused fact with fiction:

“was relatively unexplored” (55); in fact there was in Conrad’s day an

What we are proposing is that the challenging and uncertain journey on

looked forward to but never got to go on (noted below is Conrad’s admi-

the Congo flows latitudinally in a Westerly direction with riverbanks on

Conrad knew that at Kwamouth, the “entrance to [the] Kassai [is]

theless, as so often happens, a critical inertia was soon enough put in

Force Publique [sic] garrisons were scattered everywhere, often supply-

Where he perhaps overstated the unreality of the strange river on which

mained devoted to Kurtz, that particular Englishman does not believe

not “a record of experience” and was “no longer a matter of sincere

so far as to call it “one of the most scathing indictments of imperialism in

man consciousness and geographical exploration” (“Geography” 3).

They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and

Avrom Fleishman quite perceptively notes “the distinction in this pas-

of Progress,” where, as we’ve seen, that outpost is running out of sup-

desire of civilising the natives of Africa by opening the interior of that

are from what he depicted in “Heart of Darkness”: numerous individu-

An impartial view of humanity in all its degrees of splendour and misery

Finding men genuinely devoted to progress and enlightenment to be

there is no maintenance of that “honourable reciprocity of services”

The horrors Conrad revealed in the beginning of “Heart of Darkness”

haps more correctly, presents the background so vividly that we tend

1. See Conrad’s The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad: Volume 3, 1903–1907,

Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”

Delcommune, Alex[andre]. Vingt annees de Vie africaine: Recits de Voyages,

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