The Two River Narratives in Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad informed his readers that "'Youth' is a feat of memory" and a "record of experience," while "'Heart of Darkness' is experience [. . .]; but it is experience pushed a little (and a very little) beyond the actual facts of the case" ("Author's," Youth xi). The facts of the case we believe are these: Conrad composed "Heart of Darkness" by stitching together two rather different stories. At the point in the narrative where Charlie Marlow begins his voyage upriver to meet Kurtz, Conrad pushed the novel beyond his own remembered experiences by imagining Marlow journeying to a particular region deep within the heart of Africa to which the author had never traveled. The narrative then becomes 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 earlier 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 attacked in his novella was not what he understood to be the evils of imperialism. The following article should clarify many of these issues by providing readers for the first time with the correct and most relevant information regarding Marlow's voyage.

Seeking to disentangle "fact from fiction in the actual journey upriver," Norman Sherry has shown in considerable detail how Conrad apparently pushed his experience quite a lot: the journey Conrad made on "the Roi des Belges was very different [from Marlow's][. . .]. The 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 settlements" (Sherry 50, 52). It was nothing like the "mysterious and dangerous 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 Station [. . .]. Nothing," Sherry concludes, "brings out more clearly Conrad's imaginative leap between his experience and his story" (70-1).

Noting that Conrad's voyage took only twenty-eight days, Gérard Jean-Aubry proposed psychological reasons for these imaginative leaps: it "must have seemed interminable to Conrad, for he says in 'Heart of Darkness': 'It was just two months from the date we left the creek when we came to the bank below Kurtz's station'" (Sea 167). Others believe that "the lack of explicitness—[. . .] the river [. . .] instead of the Congo [. . .]—makes the story more suggestive" or contend that "Conrad's nautical jottings [of his voyage up the Congo] now become unsurpassed prose" descriptions of Marlow's river voyage (Burden 23; Hochschild 142). However, some find the suggestive prose to be less than admirable. M. M. Mahood believes that the "real trouble about this [latter] part of the tale is not that it lacks veracity [. . .] but that Conrad's own inability to realize it imaginatively results in some disastrously bad writing. We make the journey to the Inner Station only to be enveloped in adjectival fog" (27-8).

Frederick Karl and Laurence Davies simply note, "The sequence in 'Heart of Darkness' does not follow what actually happened" (CL 1: 58n); however it is not merely the sequencing of events, but their placement in "Heart...