Kurtz (Heart of Darkness)

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Mr. Kurtz is a fictional character in Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness.

Contents 1 In the Novella 2 Interpretations 3 Basis 4 Notes and references

[edit] In the Novella

Kurtz 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 charismatic 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.

His mother was half-English, his father was half-French and thus "All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.” 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 all the brutes!" He induces the natives to worship him, setting up rituals and venerations worthy of a tyrant. By the time Marlow, the protagonist, 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. Kurtz dies on the boat with the last words, "The horror! The horror!!"

[edit] Interpretations

Kurtz 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 "William Wilson," all ended up displacing their evil into other creatures. Besides these, the character of Kurtz does not resist a Nietzschean interpretation, being a sort of "Overman" whose fractured persona resembles a kind of Dionysian genius, fully aware of his desire for power and utter solitude.

Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now features a character named "Kurtz", who was based on Conrad's character. The cast of Apocalypse Now was instructed by Coppola to read Heart of Darkness.

Timothy Findley's 1993 novel Headhunter features Kurtz's escape from Heart of Darkness and subsequent reign of terror over the city of Toronto as the psychiatrist-in-chief at the Parkin Institute.

[edit] Basis

Georges Antoine Klein may have been the real-life individual upon whom Joseph Conrad based the character Kurtz.^[1] (The name Klein means 'small', while Kurtz means 'short'.) Klein was an employee of the Brussels-based trading company Societe Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Hault-Congo, and died shortly after being picked up on the steamboat Conrad was piloting. He is buried in Tchumbiri on the Congo.

In his history King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hochschild suggests that Leon Rom was one of the inspirations for the Mr. Kurtz character, citing references as the heads on the stakes outside of the station and other similarities between the two.

[edit] Notes and references