home sweet home

I don’t often like to dwell on the grotesque, but I did spend some time wondering about the significance of Kurtz’s house. Now, I can see how mounting “heads on stakes” could be a perverted form of native commodification—akin to hunting antelope and displaying their antlers on the wall. What stimulates my interest is why Kurtz would want to make those faces face in. We see how even Marlow says, “They would have been…impressive…if their faces had not been turned to the house.”

Could Conrad be trying to stir us into thinking about the colonizer reveling in the gaze of the colonized, desiring the native to look upon and emulate/mimic the colonizer? In that sense we can see the one head which is facing out (and which was “smiling continuously at some endless and jocose dream of that eternal slumber”) to be rejecting that prescribed position of subjection. That head then becomes a symbol for the “dream” of decolonization and liberation.

Or, we could read the heads on stakes as a subversive form of Foucault’s theory of surveillance. Kurtz’s house then becomes something like a panopticon. Since Kurtz wants to be watched, the natives who were punished by Kurtz and thus beheaded now become his symbolic surveillances. Instead of the normal panopticon where one guard watches many inmates, we have a situation where many inmates are forced to watch or admire one guard. This form of native humiliation is magnified when we are told that “the chiefs [of the people] came every day to see him [and] would crawl…” The rest is left to the imagination but it is easy to see how compelling the native to gaze upon its own humiliation is potentially disempowering.

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