AboutEssays1994Kurtz Text

One might imagine that as Joseph Conrad typed together the character of Mr Kurtz at the back end of the 1800’s he had no notion that his equatorial phantom, the diseased and mythic antagonist of what would become his best known book, would survive and even thrive as one of the great enigmatic figures of all time. But I like to think he knew what he was doing; that he had seen enough of human nature and the colonial process to understand precisely how our species’ instincts would unfold and repeat themselves over the coming century. And from that knowledge he forged a character whose fall from optimism into fevered anarchy could survive a hundred years of academic study and even the great mutating lens of Hollywood and continue to beguile. I think he knew that we had lived in fear of Kurtz-within us and without us-long before his book was begun, and he knew that fear would abide.

For those without the inclination to navigate the 96 pages of Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness the abiding image of Kurtz will be that of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now; skulking in the shadows to hide his own obesity rather than from any cinematic intention, transported from Conrad’s Congo to Coppola’s Vietnam but muttering the same last lines about “the horror…” in the face of a civilising mission gone wrong. But while the movie begins and ends in Asia the book opens on the Thames estuary where its narrator, Marlow, invokes Drake, the Romans and anyone else who ever sailed past the Essex marshes in pursuit of foreign goals, it is a story that from its outset is rooted in antiquity, greed and the persistence of pain.

As the sun sets over England Marlow tells his shipmates the tale of his voyage along the Congo as a kind of ghost story, one that led him the spectre of the man his mission set out to relieve, and one that concludes in literal and figurative darkness. Marlow explains how he went to Africa to work for “the company,” whose colonial endeavours seem to represent the process of civilization itself, a process Conrad paints as futile and insane.

Everything Marlow sees points toward chaos. An armoured gunboat fires artillery into the jungle at invisible enemies; a man tries to extinguish a fire with a hole in his bucket; everybody lies, everybody gets sick. Their attempts to tame the jungle with bureaucracy for profit drive the company men to murder. “When one has to make correct entries, one comes to hate these savages, hate them to death.” But at the end of the river waits the rumour of a man who sees things differently, Kurtz. Kurtz is “a prodigy,” “an emissary of pity, science and progress.” Most importantly though, Kurtz gets results for the company, “he had stolen more ivory than all the agents put together.” Marlow, a good guy-but a pragmatist is surprised to discover that Kurtz had set out, “with moral ideas of some sort,” and wonders what this Renaissance figure could have done that the company might want stopped?

In the end Marlow doesn’t get to see the enigma in action, but he gets an eyeful of the aftermath. Kurtz comes to him on his hands and knees, “not much heavier than a child.” Kurtz’s station has dissolved into anarchy, decorated with severed human heads and great bales of ivory patrolled by a native army, loyal to the ailing Kurtz, who seems to have gone insane. Having threatened to kill Kurtz it is Marlow who nurses him and protects him from the company, “that imbecile crowd,” who seek only to extinguish the man, assimilate his profits and press on.

Marlow assures his audience that Kurtz, “was a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out pre-eminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk.” By the time we meet him though he has nothing left to say, a shattered optimist run wild and destroyed by experience. It is a Russian adventurer who fills in Marlow the details of Kurtz in his prime before he too abandons the scene. He speaks of a reader of poetry, a painter, a visionary who had tamed the wilderness, at least for a moment, until it bit back like a snake un-charmed.

As he watches Kurtz die Marlow takes possession of his most telling artefact, a report he has written for, “The International Society For The Suppression Of Savage Customs.” Seventeen pages long, the document is all positive prognoses for the company project, “we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,” and applied insights set out in neat handwriting until, at a later date, it’s author scrawls across it his ultimate conclusion, “exterminate all the brutes.”

“His mind was clear,” says Marlow, “but his soul was mad,” yet he offers a less lyrical analysis as well. He suggests that Kurtz’s intellect became subordinate to his greed, that he suffered from, “images and wealth and fame revolving obsequiously round his unextinguishable gift of noble and lofty expression,” although that could also be Conrad discussing his own dilemmas as a writer, it’s still a valid point. For all his abilities and aspirations, Kurtz is just another dictator undone.

He might be a resonant character but in the end though Kurtz is a just a symptom, an example of what can and will go wrong, the product of an environment that exceeds the imaginations of those who try to tame it. The jungle itself, and what it represents are the real enigmas of the story as it calls the characters “to the profound darkness of its heart.” Conrad’s tale hints at a malign wisdom at the core of life that mocks the living. Marlow even berates his audience when he thinks they’re missing the point, “the inner truth is hidden…I felt often its mysterious stillness watching me at my monkey tricks, just as it watches you.”

The notion of Kurtz as colonial metaphor still has resonance, but if you look for instance at the occupation of Iraq you can see how potentially Kurtzian figures in the American military-people who might have spoken the language, grasped the culture and gathered popular support before it all went wrong-were overlooked, replaced and overruled by feral bureaucrats from back home. This is Kurtz’s fate in the end as well. The company men dismiss his ivory as inferior product and with a gift for euphemism any modern speechwriter would recognize they assess that, “he did not see the time was right for vigourous action…the methods are unsound.” This is why invading countries means never having to say you’re sorry-if you’re quick enough to replace and blame the people who prepared the ground. Never mind the fact that you employed them in the first place, the beat goes on.

You might find comparison too in the demise of frontline capitalism, see Kurtz as a mad accountant, surrounded by the wreckage of his fantasy, apologised for by the same legislators that encouraged him to be all he could be. We will all know better next time perhaps. Except, as Conrad continues to inform us, we probably won’t.

In an ending that could stand alone as a master class in modern fiction Marlow tells how he had taken Kurtz’s widow a painting he had entrusted to him, but when she asks him for her husband’s last words, he hides the truth, “the horror, the horror…” and says instead, “The last word he pronounced was, you name.” And so while one character at least is spared acquaintance with heart of Kurtz’s darkness, more than a century since its completion we cannot read the book, or even watch the news and say the same.

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