Kurtz (Heart of Darkness)

This article is about the character of Mr. Kurtz, from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. For Colonel Kurtz in the 1980 film Apocalypse Now, see that article.

Georges-Antoine Kurtz is a fictional character in Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness. He is an ivory trader, sent by a shadowy Belgian company into the heart of the Congo Free State. With the help of his superior technology, Kurtz has turned himself into a demigod of all the tribes surrounding his station, and gathered vast quantities of ivory in this way. As a result, his name is known throughout the region. The general manager of the company's Congo operation is jealous of Kurtz, and plots his downfall.

There are several historical character that could have been an inspiration for Joseph Conrad in creating Kurtz. These includes George Arthur Klein, a Belgian trader who died on the steamer where Joseph Conrad was in service and Arthur Hodister, another trader famous for the huge quantity of ivory tusks that he had collected. Hodister was even the author of a report which shows some similarities with Kurtz's pamphlet in Heart of Darkness. American scholar Adam Hochschild cites in his King Leopold's Ghost another character: Léon Rom, an officer famous as Kurtz for his skulls fience.

As the reader finds out at the end, Kurtz is a multitalented man - painter, writer, promising politician (ironically enough, a populist). He starts out, years before the novella begins, as an imperialist in the best tradition of the white man's burden. The reader is introduced to a painting of Kurtz's, depicting a blindfolded woman bearing a torch against a nearly black background, and clearly symbolic of his former views. Kurtz is also the author of a "pamphlet" regarding the civilization of the natives. However, over the course of his stay in Africa, he becomes corrupted. He takes his pamphlet and scribbles in, at the very end, the words "Exterminate the brutes!" He induces the natives to worship him, setting up rituals and venerations worthy of a tyrant. By the time Marlow, the narrator, sees Kurtz, he is ill with "jungle fever" and almost dead. Marlow seizes Kurtz and endeavors to take him back down the river in his steamboat, whereupon Kurtz dies. He passes his sickness to Marlow, who almost follows him into the grave.

The characterization of Kurtz is highly symbolic, and symbolism is essential to understanding this complex character. Darkness is archetypally symbolic of the primeval, uncivilized, violent force of the human psyche. In Kurtz's painting, it represents the impulses that benevolent imperialism seeks to tame. Kurtz's repeated association with this darkness reveals that it has reversed his plans and taken over him. When Marlow says that the wilderness runs in Kurtz's veins, that is what he means. Kurtz is also repeatedly associated with shadow, revealing that he represents Marlow's archetypal shadow. There are many descriptions of Kurtz's half-dead state; he can hardly walk, and is "no heavier than a child" in spite of his great stature. Marlow himself acknowledges that he and those around him consistently think of Kurtz predominantly in terms of voice.

Interpretations

The figure of Kurtz has been inviting for literary critics. Conrad himself was aware of Sigmund Freud and the developing field of psychoanalytic psychology. Naturally, critics have been eager to see Kurtz as the Jungian "shadow" (the archetype of the savage that lurks in all civilized minds) or, for Freudian critics, as a character who has sublimated his id and acts out of primal violence while denying any control. However, Kurtz also belongs to a series of Romantic heroes whose suppressed or sublimated desires lead them to a fractured psyche. Victor Frankenstein, in Frankenstein, and Prometheus in Prometheus Unbound, as well as the central figure of Edgar Allan Poe's "Wilson Wilson" all ended up displacing their evil into other creatures. Therefore, it is possible to see Kurtz as a repository of the wickedness that a bourgeoise society needs but cannot acknowledge. He is the monster that the refined Marlow cannot face.