And the dispute over how to assess the novella has shown no signs of abating in the more than quarter of a century since the essay first appeared.

In addition to the controversy over how we are to understand the way Heart of Darkness represents race, an important related issue is that of how to view the way it represents history. All techniques of reading create specific sorts of attention as well as specific sorts of inattention, and many of those methods used on Heart of Darkness have obscured the historical setting to the point of virtual invisibility. At the far end of the spectrum the story can be read and taught—and often is read and taught—as abstractly and ahistorically as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798), another famous tale of a seaman burdened by knowledge acquired on a perilous water journey that he feels compelled to impart to others in the form of a vivid narrative. This tendency, in fact, provided Adam Hochschild with an impetus for writing his historical account of the Congo Free State, King Leopold’s Ghost (1998). As Hochschild observes,

High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism. European and American readers, not comfortable acknowledging the genocidal scale of the killing in Africa at the turn of the century, have cast Heart of Darkness loose from its historical moorings. We read it as a parable for all times and places, not as a book about one time and one place (p. 143).

It is no doubt the case that a Euro-American amnesia about the atrocities in the Congo working in combination with prevalent techniques of reading that are predisposed to filtering out historical information have contributed to making Heart of Darkness so readily detachable from its historical setting. Yet this is not the whole story. We must also recognize that the book has tended to be read in an ahistorical manner because, to some extent, that is how Conrad deliberately wrote it. The Congo is never named; Brussels is identified only as “the sepulchral city,” Leopoldville as “the Central Station,” and Stanley Falls as “the Inner Station”; and Kurtz cannot be identified with a single country: “His mother was half-English, his father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz” (p. 92); as Conrad would affirm in a 1903 letter, “I took great care to give Kurtz a cosmopolitan origin” (Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 94). Conrad thus, while clearly indicating that the setting is Leopold’s Congo, also invites readers to view the events of the tale as a microcosmic reduction of European imperialism in Africa generally. It is consistent with this equivocating tendency that, in revising the manuscript, he excised a passage that clearly alluded to King Leopold (in the original version of the prologue Marlow refers to a “third rate king” who directs an allegedly philanthropic organization that furthers his own imperial ambitions), yet he nonetheless preserved the identity of his chief polemical target in the name of the steamship Marlow captains (the Roi des Belges-King of the Belgians), which was, in fact, the name of the ship on which Conrad served while in the Congo. Further, in describing the setting Conrad minimized the degree of colonial development along the Congo River (there were actually numerous factories, trading stations, and missionary outposts as well as a substantial quantity of river traffic, not only Belgian but also English, French, and Dutch), thereby intensifying what Marlow represents as the alienating, primordial aspect of the landscape. Such alterations enhance the literary attributes of the text but at the cost of historical accuracy and specificity.

To gain perspective on the artistic license Conrad took, it is useful to contrast his novella with the writings of two men who were in the Congo at the same time he was. The first, an African-American lawyer named George Washington Williams, appalled by what he had witnessed, responded by immediately writing at Stanley Falls (Kurtz’s fiefdom) an open letter to King Leopold, dated July 18, 1890, several weeks after Conrad’s arrival in the region. In this lengthy document Williams enumerated the crimes of Leopold’s agents and roundly criticized their hypocrisies. The second, an Irishman named Roger Casement, whom Conrad befriended shortly after arriving in Africa, would subsequently dedicate much of his life to publicizing the human rights abuses, most notably in the form of a widely circulated report he published in 1904 that detailed the atrocities. Conrad’s sentiments were largely the same as both of these activists. As he wrote to Casement in 1903, railing against the “ruthless, systematic cruelty towards the blacks” and offering his “warmest wishes” for the success of the Irishman’s campaign, “It is an extraordinary thing that the conscience of Europe which seventy years ago... put down the slave trade on humanitarian grounds tolerates the Congo State to day. It is as if the moral clock has been put back many hours” (Collected Letters, vol. 3, pp. 95-97). Nonetheless, Conrad consistently declined to write political pamphlets or to become directly involved in the protest movement in any other manner. As he sheepishly wrote of Casement’s cause several days later to Cunninghame Graham, “I would help him but it is not in me.