A New Prototype for Kurtz in "Heart of Darkness"

Do we need another historical precursor for Kurtz? Conrad critics have already suggested more than twenty different prototypes. These include Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Conrad's own father. Critics have also identified possible models of influence in officers, naturalists, explorers, and colonial agents who went to the Congo, the presumed setting of "Heart of Darkness" (1899), or were otherwise involved in its colonization: Leopold II, David Livingstone, Guillaume Van Kerckhoven, Cecil Rhodes, Charles Stokes, Roger Casement, Richard Burton, Georges Antonies Klein, Arthur Hodister, Eduard Schnitzer "Emin Pasha," Edmund Barttelot, Charles Henry Stokes, Carl Peters, Paul Voulet, James Sligo Jameson, Henry Morgan Stanley, and Léon Rom.¹ While Peter Firchow maintains that "[n]one of these models quite fits" (35), Patrick Brantlinger speculates that Conrad likely had many models in mind for Kurtz, and all of the "white officers in charge of Leopold's empire were in essence Kurtzes" (268). However, only the Belgian officer Léon Rom, first advanced as a prototype by Molly Mahood in the 1970s, has been connected to what Adam Hochschild calls Kurtz's "signal feature" (145): the heads on stakes around his house—which also forms a graphic climax of the novel. According to F.R. Leavis, who charges the novella for its unapologetic insistence on trying to say what it cannot say, the heads on stakes form an exception to its rule of vagueness: "an essential vibration emanates" from particular details, forming "a legitimate kind of comment," evoked with "charged concreteness" (176)—"a direct significant glimpse" (177). But from where did Conrad get the idea for this concrete picture?

As I will argue, a paragraph in the hitherto untranslated book Tre År i Kongo (1887), written in Swedish by G. Pagels, P. Möller, and E. Gleerup, provides a more fitting model for this vibrant picture than the one advanced by Molly Mahood. This is a bold claim, as the number of references in secondary literature suggests that Léon Rom, whom Mahood links to "Heart of Darkness," is one of the most widely accepted prototypes.² Moreover, the source I am advancing, as I will show, challenges the exclusively European prototypes advanced by other critics and, by extension, the notion that in "collecting the heads," as Torgovnick asserts, Kurtz must have "acted out a Western fantasy of savagery" (148).

This essay will begin by quoting from the passage in "Heart of Darkness" and a related, deleted passage in its holograph manuscript. I will then revisit the merits of Mahood's source as a possible influence for this pivotal passage before introducing my source as a contender. Since my argument does not seek to prove a direct link between the source and Conrad's text, it leaves the question open whether the passage is the product of Conrad's imagination or whether it is necessarily connected to his actual experience in the Congo. The essay will end with a note on why the Swedish source has been overlooked as well as a brief comparison with other sources that have sought to locate Kurtz's image in a specific historical personage, with reference to the same passage.

HEADS ON STAKES: ARCHITECTURE OF ATROCITIES

The passage under discussion in "Heart of Darkness" is from when Marlow arrives at Kurtz's Inner Station, stands at the deck of his steamer, converses with the Russian Harlequin, and takes up his binoculars to look at the shore, "sweeping the limit of the forest at each side and at the back of the house" (Conrad 102). Directing his binoculars at Kurtz's house, he sees what could be a familiar sight in any well-kept European suburb: an ornamented pole-fence. The fence is made up in the most unexpected and terrifying way, creating the novella's graphic climax. As "one of the remaining posts of that vanished fenced leaped into my field of my glass," Marlow explains,

I had suddenly a nearer view and its first result was to make me throw my head back as if before a blow. Then I went carefully from post to post with my glass, and...